
James Dyson says he spent £500M of his own money on the company’s canceled EV - rbanffy
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/17/21261473/james-dyson-electric-vehicle-tesla
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Traster
The thing that mystifies me about the electric car move is it was such a bold
move into such a different area with seemingly no justification and failed
incredibly quickly. It went from conception, to manufacturing to discontinued
in 2 years.

This is a company that essentially has exclusively been selling different
iterations of air blowers. I get why a hoover company thought branching out
into hair dryers and fancy bladeless fans, I just fail to see the steps
between that and a fully blown electric vehicle. They seem to have the Apple
business model where they're selling a premium version of normal products and
its an amazing money spinner, but their forays into technology outside of
their core competence seems very strange.

Oh and also it's a very strange title, because Dyson is a privately owned
company, so whilst its news that the amount spent was £500m, it's obviously
going to be his own money, he owns the company.

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JoeAltmaier
Its not clear they failed on the technology/engineering front? It was a hard
sell - expensive, heavy (5000lbs!). Marketing of autos is clearly a very
different thing (dealerships? seasonal dips? advertising?) and there they may
have exceeded their reach.

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kingkongjaffa
A competent take to market plan would have included engineering towards a
price point that customers would stomach.

If it's too expensive that is clearly poor engineering.

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andrewmcwatters
Reminds me of a video I was watching on AvE's YouTube channel, must have been
his Juicero video, where he said something along the lines of how any idiot
can make a high quality product by using expensive materials, but good
engineering is bring a high quality product to market at an attractive price.

~~~
serf
>any idiot can make a high quality product by using expensive materials, but
good engineering is bring a high quality product to market at an attractive
price.

it's a cute sentiment, but it throws out on-the-edge engineering work that
produces little product, or engineering that is subsidized elsewhere where the
cash value is of little importance.

For example, I never thought the fine folks engineering at NASA were idiots,
nor the people at defense groups like Northrop Grumman -- but i'd hardly call
their wares a good 'cash value'.

