Dyson had big plans for the electric vehicle market 

Dyson, the technology company known for its high-power vacuum
cleaners and blowdryers, has thrown in the towel when it comes to
making an electric vehicle. 

In an email to employees posted on its
Website^[1], Dyson, which is lead by
Sir James Dyson, the British inventor, said the company’s engineers
were able to create a “fantastic electric car” but that it will
never be seen by consumers because it can’t be made
commercially. 

RELATED: BRITISH VACUUM CLEANER
MAKER DYSON IS DEVELOPING AN ELECTRIC CAR ^[2]

Dyson had big plans for the electric vehicle
market 

Back in 2016, Dyson announced plans to make an electric vehicle which it said at the
time would be radical. It earmarked  £2bn for the
project, with half the money going to build the car and the other
half for electric battery development. In the fall of last year, it
announced it was building the vehicle at a plant in Singapore, with
the first car expected to be available in 2021.^[3]

But in the email, Dyson said the company couldn’t afford
to compete with the larger companies developing electric vehicles.
It does plan to continue to work on its battery technology.
Dyson^[4]
said the company will use the funds to develop other products as
well. The team developing the electric vehicle and battery was
523 strong, with 500 of them
located in the UK. 

“This is not a product failure, or a failure of the team,
for whom this news will be hard to hear and digest,” Dyson wrote in
the email. “We have tried very hard throughout the development
process, we simply can no longer see a way to make it commercially
viable.”  Dyson said he is in the process of
finding different roles for the employees in its home division
which churns out the vacuums, hairdryers, and
fans. 

Dyson will continue to invest in new
technology 

The inventor turned CEO went on to say the company will
continue its £2.5bn investment program into
new technology^[5], that it plans to
grow its new University and expand at Malmesbury, Hullavington,
Singapore and other global locations. Development dollars will
focus on manufacturing solid-state batteries,
sensing technologies, vision systems, robotics, machine learning,
and AI.  

“In summary, our investment appetite is undiminished and we will
continue to deepen our roots in both the UK and Singapore,” he
wrote. “This is not the first project which has changed direction
and it will not be the last.”