Sir James Dyson to make electric cars

Dyson says he is putting £2 billion into developing the car which should be on the road in 2020.

“Battery technology is very important to Dyson, electric motors are very important to Dyson, environmental control is very important to us,” says Dyson, “I have been developing these technologies consistently because I could see that one day we could do a car.”

Dyson says he has been looking at the technology since 1998.

He has had 400 engineers working on the car project for two and a half years.

According to Dyson, the motor is already developed but, a spokesman told Electronics Weekly, for competitive reasons no details will be released until close to the vehicle launch.

Motor design is a Dyson speciality, with the company pioneering the use of very high rotational speed (~100,000rpm) in mass-produced motors to increase power/volume ratio.

At the moment the car lacks a design, a chassis, a battery and a manufacturing location.

Apart from saying that the car would not be a sports car, would not be cheap and would not look like any other electric car, Dyson is saying little about the project.

Dyson on clean vehicles

As he revealed the vehicle, Dyson founder James Dyson spoke of his long-term dedication to reducing pollution, including publishing sketches from a notebook, drawn three decades ago, describing an exhaust particulate cleaning system.

In 1988 I read a paper by the US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, linking the exhaust from diesel engines to premature death in laboratory mice and rats. In March 1990 a team at Dyson began work on a cyclonic filter that could be fitted on a vehicle’s exhaust system to trap particulates.

By 1993 we had developed several working prototypes and showed an early iteration to British television programme Blue Peter. The team went on to develop a much more sophisticated technology.

To our chagrin, nobody at the time was interested in employing our diesel exhaust capture system and we stopped the project. The industry said that ‘disposing’ of the collected soot was too much of a problem! Better to breathe it in?

In the period since, governments around the world have encouraged the adoption of oxymoronically designated ‘clean diesel’ engines through subsidies and grants. Major auto manufacturers have circumvented and duped clean air regulations. As a result, developed and developing cities are full of smog-belching cars, lorries and buses. It is a problem that others are ignoring.