Can Dyson Reinvent The Electric Car? | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by brilliant org have you heard about this whole electric car thing the number of new electric cars coming out in the next five years is actually it's it's it's completely mind-blowing especially now that the major manufacturers have finally started treating electric cars like something people actually want to buy and not just some kind of you know compliance car to meet regulatory standards GM has announced eleven battery electric cars amongst their lineup Volkswagen has 27 electric cars coming out by the year 2022 and Volvo has announced that they're going to go completely electric their entire fleet by the year 2025 Porsche Audi Jaguar BMW Mercedes these are all luxury brands obviously but one of them that I'm most excited about is the Hyundai Kona evie which is going to get 258 miles per charge for around $30,000 this is a transition that is actually starting to happen and one of the big reasons why the big manufacturers are finally getting involved in this is because there's been an explosion and startups that are looking to kind of capitalize on this transition you got Tesla obviously they're the big guys but riffian just released their new SUV and pickup trucks that's going to get 400 miles per charge there's also Bollinger Buyten Faraday future and lucid err the last of those two unfortunately have hit some major stumbling blocks and may not ever see the light of day stumbling blocks that would be hard for any easy startup to deal with but there is a new player on the way in the IDI world one with a team of hundreds of engineers working on it one with 2.7 billion dollars to throw at the problem in over 30 years of design and manufacturing experience and that company is Dyson yes that Dyson the vacuum cleaner company led by its obsessive and enigmatic founder James Dyson they claim to have patented a new electric motor and are working on revolutionary battery technology that might put them years ahead of the rest of the pack is the guy who reinvented the vacuum cleaner and many other household products about to do the same thing for the car or much like his $400 hairdryer they're just a bunch of hot air James Dyson was born in 1947 in Cromer England where as a child he excelled at long-distance running what does that have to do with this nothing nothing whatsoever he later studied furniture and interior design at the Royal College of Art before switching his interest to engineering what does that have to do with this 1974 at the age of 27 he was working for his summer at the family farm and he ran into trouble with the wheelbarrow it was just driving him crazy it kept getting stuck in mud and stuff like that and he figured out that if he put a ball on there it would actually maneuver around the countryside a little bit better so he did that called it the ball barrow and that became his first invention this product was a mild success but in the process of cleaning up and maintaining his work space where he made the ball burrows he found that the paint and dust kept clogging up his Hoover vacuum cleaner and he kept having to change the bag multiple times every time he cleaned up and this is how he drives someone with OCD completely crazy so this was on his mind and he was out taking a walk one day and he walked past a sawmill at the top of this sawmill on the roof they had this cyclone system that separated out the dirt from the air and it gave him an idea he made kind of a rudimentary cyclone system just out of cardboard on his back and cleaner at home and it kind of worked so he you know tweaking and refining this design became an obsession for him and then in 1983 after famously creating 5127 prototypes he finally launched his g-force dual cyclone bagless vacuum cleaner even though the price was many many times more than his competitors the improvement and quality of the use of this thing was so much and people were so ready to get rid of their bags and stop changing bags on their vacuum cleaners that it became a hit and that's when James Dyson got filthy stinking rich in the beginning he licensed it to third-party retailers but eventually started selling it under his own name and became one of the highest revenue vacuum cleaning companies in the entire world and since then the Dyson company has used their expertise in air flow technology to create a variety of household products including an air blade hand dryer the bladeless fan and the supersonic hairdryer oh no I don't know anybody that actually has the air blade hand dryer in their homes I know Ernie you guys that fancy and along the way his company has hired a small army of young engineers that constantly innovate and improve their products in fact the average age of engineers working at Dyson is 26 dyson has said on numerous occasions that he likes to hire people as young as possible right out of school because quote the enthusiasm and lack of fear is important not taking notice of experts and ploughing on because you believe in something is important it's much easier to do when you're young oh the energy of the youth of course the skeptic in me wants to say that of course he hires young people because you can pay them less than experienced engineers but that's Nanna here there in fact he recently lobbied the UK Parliament to create a university right there in his company they bring in kids as young as 17 years old they give them credits for work that they spend there they make paid internships out of it they attend classes right there on campus they do the whole thing and one of the little trademarks of the Dyson corporation is they give everybody these yellow and black notebooks marked confidential and all their engineers are encouraged to just kind of write down all their ideas in it and when the books get filled they get stored away in a vault this is known not just to you know keep track of everybody's ideas but also for patent litigation which it turns out is kind of a big part of their business unlike say Elon Musk who opened up all of Tesla's patents for other companies to use Dyson actually vigorously vigorously defends their patents and has an entire section of their company that just focuses on patent infringement so you know keeping all these engineer ideas in a vault is sort of part of a massive CY 8 campaign by the company so they can always prove that they had some idea first so I mean is that smart is it sketchy what do you think so their announcement in 2015 they were gonna be working on an electric car kind of caught a lot of people off-guard I mean you know the vacuum cleaner guy but one thing that Dyson Ames company has excelled at is building off of what they've learned from previous products you know they were able to take what they learn from their dual cyclone vacuum cleaner and we're able to put that into smaller handheld portable vacuum cleaners and in order to make those more efficient they had to innovate new technologies and electric motors and battery design and so you know you got battery design electric motors maybe electric cars and ethical stuff details are scarce at this point but here's what we know so far they're planning for the car to go into production in 2020 it's just over a year away and they're gonna be available to buy in 2021 and they've already secured manufacturing space in Singapore it'll use what they're calling a digital motor which is kind of a scaled up version of the electric motor that they use in their handheld devices the thing is their products use a permanent magnet induction motor which is actually what they use on the model 3 so I don't know if there's something significant about this motor that makes it different or better than what's already out there I guess what's up to wait and see he said it won't be a sports car but it also won't be economy minded like the leaf it'll have a premium price tag to it and he didn't say exactly what they were gonna do but he did say we wanted to completely redesign it because quote there's no point in doing one that looks like everybody else's although he does appear to want to kind of follow the Tesla model by producing a high end low volume car to start with and then do more mass-market cars later on so it sounds like he's out to completely redefine what a car is what it looks like and how it works and one place where he's starting with that is with the battery perhaps the most eyebrow-raising part of their announcement was that they say they plan to do this on an architecture of solid state batteries and the reason why that is eyebrow-raising is because solid state batteries don't really exists at least not anywhere near the scale that would be needed for an electric car so yeah the difference here is that the lithium-ion batteries we use today they store and release electricity through chemical reactions in a liquid electrolyte so these batteries have the dual problem of creating a lot of heat which has to be cool through a complex cooling system in these cars but also they degrade over time especially if you don't charge them well if you don't maintain them very well the more you charge them up the more they lose their charge over time plus they weigh a lot so solid-state batteries get rid of that fluid electrolyte and replace it with a ceramic plate and ideally this means less heat which means you don't have to have that cooling system which means that cars running on solid-state batteries can pack more battery in there more battery means more range and more range means more gooder and Dyson is so big on this technology they made their first company purchase ever when they bought the company set key 3 a solid-state battery started up in 2015 Safdie 3 is based out of Michigan and their name comes from the Sanskrit word for power and the number 3 stands for the atomic weight of lithium but their goal is to create this solid-state battery in a way that makes it just as cheap to make it as safe screen TV now this technology is still in the development at the time of recording this anyway so it's rumored that Dyson's first cars are probably gonna run on our traditional lithium ion batteries if the word traditional even applies to electric cars on top of the manufacturing issues to work out one of the concerns about solid-state batteries is that you know just because something works in a lab doesn't mean it's ready for you know the potholes that we drive over every day the downside of something being solid is that solid things are more fragile especially ceramics and there's also concerned that these batteries can still perform at the variance of temperatures that cars experience and on top of all that right now anyway is the cost so eventually they hope to get it down to you know the price of like I said a flat-screen TV but right now it would be two thousand dollars to create a battery that could just run a vacuum cleaner it gets pricey so there is a lot of skepticism out there as to whether or not these kinds of batteries are gonna work out but you know they are working on it hopefully they'll get this sorted out in the next few years fingers crossed so if onlys has you excited about what dyson is about to bring to the table here's where i squash that enthusiasm and excitement the way i do best it's a gift yeah there's a lot of things going up against dyson right now the number one thing is just that they've never built an electric car they never built anything remotely this size now granted they have decades of manufacturing experience and that's not small peanuts but cars come with just a mountain of regulatory issues that you know vacuum cleaners just don't know also in fairness that could be said about any of the evie startups that are out there people went and said that about Tesla now another problem for this car is this gonna be coming out right in the middle of a flurry of new EVs out there both from startups and from the big major manufacturers so in order for theirs to be successful something about it is gonna have to really stand out above the rest hence they're you know looking into the new battery technology now personally and and this just might be because I have a lot of years of like marketing and advertising experience under my belt but I think that Dyson has a name problem you know for decades they've been associated with vacuum cleaners granted they're awesome vacuum cleaners but I just can't imagine somebody you know going to a party and being like dude I just bought a Dyson car now this could change obviously if the car is awesome enough but you brand names matter and it's hard to say where there are customers brand loyalty for their fans and their vacuum cleaners is going to translate to you know wanting to drive around in their car car is more of a status symbol it's kind of how we represent ourselves for better for worse you know when we leave our homes now it also needs to be said Dyson is a bit of a divisive figure in Britain he was actually a supporter brexit which was supposed to kind of bolster manufacturing jobs in the UK and he's actually gonna be shipping these jobs over to Singapore to build this car so that just doesn't really sit well for some people now having said all that they do have a ton of things going in their favour including a mountain of innovations and patents that they built up over the years and for example they want to get rid of windshield wipers altogether because the windshield wipers they can scratch the windshield they you know you have to replace the rubber on the thing after a while they actually want to use that air blade technology to just keep all the water off of the windshield with a jet of air Dyson is investing 2.7 billion dollars in this project including buying a former RAF airfield huh Lovington airfield where they're gonna be testing and developing the car they have a small army of four hundred engineers I've been working on this car for the last three years and they plan on doubling that in the next year and at the same time they've been recruiting executives from legacy automakers like BMW and Porsche in the final and perhaps biggest reason to not completely count out Dyson is they've got an amazing track record of success can't argue with that it is interesting to me to compare Dyson's approach to other innovators like say Elon Musk he was known for charging forward as fast as possible you know failing big and failing early pushing technology at a breakneck pace he tends to kind of figure it out as he goes whereas Dyson is famously perfectionistic he's more in the vein of say Steve Jobs he puts his products through thousands of different iterations before he finally deems it ready for market and has actually got him in trouble when they tried to do an autonomous robot vacuum cleaner it took him more than 10 years to get this product the way he wanted it and by the time he finally released it in 2014 rumbas were basically a household name and everybody already had him so he kind of missed out not sure his head advanced navigation and cleaning technology attached to it but you know it's kind of hard to convince somebody to spend that much more money when they already have a perfectly capable robot cleaning their house right now for a third of the price it was one of their few bombs the question is will this be the fate of their electric car it could be a similar situation well their desire to completely reinvent the car collide with the fact that there's a major influx of EVs coming out between now and when they release theirs is there's gonna be so spectacular that'll stand out amongst a crowd or they can be the next Faraday future whether this company is successful or not it'll be fun and interesting to see what comes out of it they're definitely exciting times keeping up with advancements in battery technology is basically a full-time job and I should know because it's basically my full-time job but 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 486,010

Rating: 4.8192854 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, electric vehicles, electric car, dyson, james dyson, Dyson vacuum cleaner, dual cyclone technology, ball barrow, dyson air blade, ev, solid state batteries, satki3, hullavington field

Id: uQM5p448fXs

Length: 15min 38sec (938 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 10 2018