Dyson Unveils its Cancelled Electric Car

James Dyson says he spent £500M of his own money on the company’s canceled Electric vehicle.

Sir James Dyson

Dyson revealed that his electric vehicle, codenamed “N526", initially planned as an SUV that aimed to challenge Tesla in the EV market.

While Tesla has already marked its place in automation industry into the electric age, it’s been easy to forget that Dyson the engineering giant behind vacuums, air purifiers, and lighting has been quietly investing billions into building an electric vehicle of its own that it aimed to bring to market in 2021. It even opened a $260 million facility last year to develop and test said vehicle, which would ultimately be manufactured in Singapore. But, according to The Times  reported today, Dyson’s EV project is dead.

Dyson's company decided to reveal the electric car, codenames "N526", during an interview of British billionaire James Dyson topping the Sunday Times list of richest people, with an estimated £16.2 billion.

According to The Times, James Dyson’s cancelled his own electric vehicle, codenamed technically as"N526", would have had a seven seater with an amazing 600 miles range per charge and could go from 0 to 62 mph in 4.8 seconds which is quite impressive, it would have also been an impressive jump from Tesla Model S 610 km (379 miles) and almost doubling the long-range Tesla Model X 475 km (257 miles) on a single charge.

Further, The Dyson's EV is a huge five meters long, two meters wide and 1.7 meters tall weighed 2.6 tons and had a top speed of 125 mph, with twin 200kW electric motors rated with 536BHP and 480lb/ft of torque.

Dyson's aluminium electric car had a solid-state batteries, which could apparently sustain such performance “even on a freezing February night, on the naughty side of 70MPH on the motorway, with the heater on and the radio at full blast".
It also focused on manufacturing solid state batteries and other fundamental technologies like Sensing technologies, Vision systems, Robotics, Machine Learning, and AI.

As the owner of the company, Dyson told The Times that this project ended up costing £500 million of his own money before he put a stop to it. Unlike other traditional car brands, Dyson doesn’t have a fleet of profitable gasoline cars and diesel cars to offset the “huge losses” on every electric vehicle made each Dyson electric car have needed to make £150,000 to break even, according to the entrepreneur.

The cars test track in Britain

Dyson said they didn’t see a way to make it commercially viable. Dyson revealed the reason behind scrapping the project was the immense cost to build it and the lack of profitability. He said how he blew more than £500 million of his own money to fund the project. He also said that to make profit he needed to sell each of these electric SUVs for no less than 150,000 pound (around ₹1.37 crore).

 Tesla isn't commercially viable so far. Every year they've been in business they made millions of dollars in losses ever since it went public but atleast its electric vehicles are on road. They just have enough backers that keep pumping money into it. Dyson just didn't want to go there yet.

Even though the Dyson car is no more, its spirit lives on. The founder said the 500-strong team are already working on various other projects, and that he is open to the idea of letting car makers tap into his company’s solid-state batteries, which are supposedly more efficient and compact than current lithium ion cells. As to whether the company would try making cars again some day, Dyson said only if it becomes commercially viable then.


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Information credits : The Times
Image credits: Sunday Times Driving