Aston Martin Gives Dyson Warm Welcome to Automaking
Yesterday we told you that vacuum maker Dyson was getting ready to "imminently" announce they were building an electric car. Turns out that wasn't an exaggeration. Later that day they made it official, and Aston Martin CEO had a warm welcome to the automotive world for them.
Just hours after Dyson announced that the company was committing £2 billion to designing and building an EV of their own, Aston CEO tweeted this photo of a V12-powered vacuum and a welcome to the independent British car company club.
While that Aston vacuum is pretty amazing, especially the V12 header-inspired side profile. The real news here is the Dyson electric car.
"Dyson has begun work on a battery electric vehicle, due to be launched by 2020," said Sir James Dyson, in an e-mail to employees. The company already has a team of over 400 engineers, some were already in the company, some are recruits from the automotive industry.
Dyson wouldn't reveal specifics, due to worries about the competition, but said that the project would "grow quickly from here."
"It is our obligation to offer a solution to the world's largest single environmental risk. I look forward to showing you all what I hope will be something quite unique and better, in due course," Dyson said in the e-mail.
Dyson said that the company had previously looked at adding a cyclonic-style filer to trap exhaust particulates as far back as 1990, but "nobody at the time was interested." But people are interested today, and Dyson said that "Rather than filtering emissions at the exhaust pipe, today we have the ability to solve it at the source."
Dyson isn't the first non-automotive company to enter the EV ring, but they are one of the bigger companies to do it. And their $3.3 billion commitment to designing and building the car is a more realistic number for putting a car into production than the shoe-string budgets some smaller companies have to work with.
