Inventor James Dyson shows electric cars are too easy to make. That’s why his US$2.5 billion project was doomed to fail
- Dyson has now abandoned its £2 billion plan to branch out and take on the likes of Tesla and Volkswagen
- Whereas cars with a combustion engine need about 30,000 components, an electric vehicle needs just 11,000 parts, according to Goldman Sachs
The British company, best known for its expensive vacuum cleaners, has now abandoned its £2 billion (US$2.5 billion) plan to branch out and take on the likes of Tesla and Volkswagen.
Dozens of start-ups have entered the fray over the past few years, from Tesla and Lucid Motors in the US, to Byton and NIO in China. Since 2011, electric vehicle start-ups have raised US$18 billion in funding, and announced 43 models and the capacity to make 3.9 million vehicles a year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. That’s a lot of competition.
While Dyson’s £1.1 billion pounds of Ebitda (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) in 2018 gave the relatively small British manufacturer some money to play with, standing out from the electric vehicle crowd would have been quite the challenge.