Dyson shows electric car that will not go into production

Dyson has shown its electronic car for the first time. The manufacturer of vacuum cleaners, among other things, worked on this for years, but decided to stop the project at the end of last year. Founder James Dyson says the project cost him £500m.

Dyson’s electric car was codenamed N526. The company has never shown the car, but James Dyson is now doing so in an interview with British newspaper The Times. The car has seven seats and should have had a range of more than 965 kilometers, through the use of solid-state batteries, which the company has developed itself.

According to Dyson, the car could have maintained that range in the winter and at high speeds with the heating on, by using those batteries. However, Dyson dropped out of the project at the end of last year because it was not financially viable. The goal was to release the car in 2021.

The car would be equipped with two 200kW electric motors and could accelerate from 0 to 100 km/h in 4.8 seconds, despite the weight of more than 2600 kg. The top speed would be 200 km/h. There is a working prototype of the car, which measures 5 meters in length, 2 meters in width and 1.7 meters in height.

Dyson announced in 2017 that it was working on an electric car. At the end of last year, the company announced that the project was scrapped. At that time, 2.5 billion pounds had been invested. James Dyson now says he has put 500 million pounds into it himself. According to the CEO, each car should have raised 150,000 pounds to make the project commercially attractive.

The team of 500 people who worked on the car is now working on other projects. Dyson says it is open to collaborations with other manufacturers who want to use the company’s solid-state batteries. They would be both more efficient and more compact than the commonly used lithium-ion batteries.