A Dyson Electric Car by 2020? James Dyson must have cracked Solid State batteries
James Dyson has announced Dyson will invest £2 billion build a battery electric car to launch by 2020. It will be radical and different. And expensive.
But despite the success, the wealth, the country estate and the satisfaction of having achieved more than most, James Dyson isn’t resting on his laurels. Instead, he’s building an Electric Car.
Dyson is stumping up £2 billion to build the ‘DysonMobile’, and Sir James says it will be ready to hit the road on 2020, will be ‘Individual’ and not cheap. A bit like all Dyson products.
It’s a bold move from Dyson, and one that we feel must be based on a breakthrough from Dyson on Solid State batteries, otherwise it makes little sense to take the gamble and the join the plethora of companies – existing car makers and new technology companies – hoping for a slice of the biggest upheaval in cars since – well, since we first got cars.
We know Toyota has made progress with Solid State batteries, and we also know Dyson has been working to achieve the same for some time.
A couple of years ago Dyson gobbled up a battery start-up called Sakti3 for around £65 million which looked to have made significant progress on Solid State batteries, with a raft of patents to support it.
But earlier this year Dyson seemed to have dropped the patents of Sakti3, which could have meant they were not workable in the real world, or that Dyson had cracked it themselves with new patents superseding those owned by Satki3.
This announcement must mean Dyson has the technology cracked, and if it’s on a par with what’s expected from Toyota’s Solid State batteries that should mean double the range, a fraction of the time to charge and much cheaper to produce too.
So we can probably look forward to a quirky Dyson electric car with a premium price tag and a range of over 600 miles from a single, much shorter charge.
It’s going to be interesting.
Mark Geller says
Boy, to say an announcement equals a success is possibly the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard from any writer, especially, in this field. I don’t think anyone has cracked the solid state battery with sufficient success to operate anything but an appliance, and a small one at that. the sakti tech that Dyson first invested in, then basically took over as the largest investor, has never, ever, been shown to be efficacious on a scale required to operate a car. Nor has Dyson filed any new patents on this type of tech. The other writers would be all over that as well as the general scientific community.
My prediction is if Dyson keeps throwing dough at this, he will eventually abandon solid state (as will Toyota) which has many issues (not saying they will never be solved) and come with something in Li-on that gets 400-500 miles in an Apple/Dyson- like fashion forward design– if he really wants to be in this business, which he appears to given the amount of money he’s spending and personnel he is hiring. I believe maybe IBM’s “battery 500” (a 450-500 mile Li-on with superior battery management) may happen, but not solid state by 2022. Just IMO, granted.