VACUUM CLEANING hypocrite Sir James Dyson has announced that his plans for an electric car have reached the ‘Bag Full’ stage.
The firm, best known for its hand driers that feel like taking part in a Bushtucker Trial, had previously announced plans to produce the car in Singapore, despite Dyson’s previous support for British industry in the wake of Brexit.
Dyson said, in an email to his 500 UK employees, that his company had built a “fantastic” car, but that he couldn’t find a way to make it “commercially viable”. He added that he had tried to find a new home for the product but had failed to do so, and decided to pull the plug. Possibly because it got caught on the corner of the bed.
Dyson’s approach was different from that of more established electric car makers. The Suckbot 3000 (not its real name) was never meant to be a mass-market vehicle, but with 50 per cent of the 2bn dollars research going on improving batteries alone, it was to be a game-changer for others to follow.
Dyson has confirmed that although much of the money has already been spent, its uses can be transferred to other projects, including further research on next-generation batteries, which will be useful for countless other future Dyson products.
It seems that what this whole adventure has proved is that £2bn is small potatoes in this game, and the established names will have a stranglehold on this market, purely on account of their seemingly limitless reserves.
One only has to look at the story of Tesla, which has come further than anyone had a right to expect, yet still faces concerns over cashflow as it attempts to bring its products to market.
As for Dyson, although this journey is over, let’s reassure ourselves that despite being made by a company best known for its vacuum cleaners, it didn’t suck. µ