DYSON’S ELECTRIC SHOCK
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FORTUNE.COM // NOVEMBER 2019
filter. He also blames U.K. and European regulators who insisted
that diesel was “green and clean,” despite abundant scientific
evidence of ill-health effects. “There was a sort of jilted feeling,”
he says, acknowledging his search for new technology “has been
lurking” ever since. Grand projects have been started for shakier
reasons.
W
ORK ON the top-secret car program began in earnest in
2015, as Dyson recruited auto industry veterans from
Aston Martin and Jaguar Land Rover. The company is
accustomed to operating clandestinely. Bitter experi-
ence from Dyson’s earliest days as an inventor, when he says a
competitor pinched his wheelbarrow design, taught the entre-
preneur to be paranoid. Products inside the company are known
only by a number until they are publicly unveiled. (An early ver-
sion of the doomed car was called “N526.”) Fingerprint scanners
control access to labs.
But this time the secret got out. The U.K. government acci-
dentally revealed Dyson’s work on an electric car in an industrial
strategy report it published online. That, and the increasing scale
of the endeavor—which included a 200-million-pound refurbish-
ment of the old RAF airfield to serve as the design and testing
hub for the car and the hiring of hundreds of people—forced
Dyson to come clean. In September 2017, he held a press confer-
ence in London to officially announce the project, saying he was
committing 2 billion pounds to the endeavor, including 1 billion
aimed at producing a breakthrough in battery technology.
Automotive experts thought the sum was paltry compared
with what would be needed to build a car. But it was orders of
magnitude bigger than anything Dyson had ever spent on a
new product. Its Supersonic hair dryer, for instance, which it
launched in 2016, had taken four years and cost $71 million to
develop. Many also doubted Dyson’s premise that its technical
know-how would transfer to electric cars. “An electric vehicle is
not just a big hair dryer,” says George Crabtree, director of the
U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint Center for Energy Storage
Research at the Argonne National Laboratory.
Dyson was undeterred. The company was committed to
rethinking the car from first principles—a philosophy that
had underpinned Dyson’s success in household products. “We
wanted to change everything and not use other people’s archi-
tectural layout,” Dyson says. The company would design all its
components in-house, from motors to windshield wipers. “If
you look at the way other auto companies operate, they treat
components as black boxes,” says Andrew Clothier, Dyson’s
director of technical research. They buy parts off the shelf and
bolt them together. That’s cheaper and faster but comes at the
expense of innovation, he says. Dyson would try a completely
different approach. (Tesla also designs its own electric motors,
battery packs, and chargers.)
The car Dyson’s team came up with was about the size of a
Range Rover but with a longer wheelbase; a lower roofline;
and a short, stubbed nose leading to a dramatically sloped
“Anybody can build an electric car,” veteran
automotive analyst Maryann Keller says. “It’s
an open playing field.”
Dyson thought he had a better shot than
most. His company was thriving, with 2018
sales jumping 25% to a record $5.6 billion.
Pretax operating profits topped $1 billion for
the first time, driven by strong demand in
Asia, where Dyson is a status-conferring con-
sumer brand. Through its vacuums, Dyson’s
company already was a global leader in elec-
tric motors. It knew batteries too, thanks to its
cordless products. Key EV concepts like air-
flow and climate control also were present in
all of Dyson’s appliances. “When we realized,
almost by accident, that we had the technol-
ogy to build an electric car, it was natural to
go into it,” Dyson says. Back in 2015, when he
first conceived of it, Dyson says there seemed
to be ample room in the market for a chassis-
to-moonroof rethink of what an EV should be.
“You have to remember that four or five years
ago, only Tesla was on the scene,” he says. “So
it was a very different sort of environment.”
The inventor had made a career of proving
skeptics wrong. He’d successfully reimagined
one mundane household product after another,
starting with an innovative wheelbarrow in
- He’d made his name and fortune with the
bagless vacuum cleaner, which used a “cyclone”
effect to draw dust out of the air. Launched in
1993, the vacuums featured a transparent bin
that let you see exactly how much dust you’d
sucked up. (He famously overruled market-
ing experts who told him no one would buy a
vacuum that showcased the dirt.) New models
included advancements such as ball-like
handle attachments for maneuvering into tight
corners. Slim cordless uprights were made pos-
sible by the company’s electric motor research.
Dyson was also adept at extending his expertise
into new categories, like the Airblade hand
dryer as well as bladeless fans and air purifiers.
While a car may have looked like a leap,
Dyson had been building up to designing one
for years, in part because of a hankering to
invent a solution for the pollution-spewing
internal combustion engine. Affronted by the
smell and smoke from diesel engines, in the
late 1980s and early 1990s he developed a fil-
ter for the particulate belched by trucks, based
on technology used in his bagless vacuum. But
trucking companies refused to buy it, he says,
because they didn’t want to have to empty the
