A Product Worth Making

On 10 October 2019 James Dyson told his staff that the company had developed a fantastic electric car and could no longer see a way to make it commercially viable (reported). The programme had been public for two years. Dyson announced it in September 2017 as part of a £2.5 billion technology investment, chose Singapore in 2018 for a car plant with a launch then aimed at 2021, and built and tested prototypes at its Hullavington airfield campus in Wiltshire (reported). None of that was frivolous. By 2017 Dyson had spent years building its own high-speed digital motors, battery packs and power electronics and had used them to enter hand dryers, cordless vacuums and hair care at premium prices. Motors and batteries are the heart of an electric car, and Dyson made both.

What it did not make was everything else. A car is a body, a chassis, an interior, a set of safety systems and a certificate to sell, assembled, painted and inspected at a volume of tens of thousands a year before its costs approach a carmaker's. Dyson had never stamped a body panel, run a paint shop or homologated a vehicle, and the incumbents it would have competed with were selling electric cars at a loss to meet European emissions targets, spreading the losses over large petrol-car businesses (reported in general terms). James Dyson later said he had lost about £500 million of his own money on the project (reported). The Singapore plant was never built and no car was sold.

The sum was large for a private company and small against what the alternative would have cost: a plant, a launch, a dealer or direct-sales network and years of losses on a car that, by Dyson's own judgment, could not be sold at a price above its full cost. The companion's study of failures counts the cancellation among the decisions in which an owner stopped a product before it consumed the parent. The rest of Dyson's business shows that the judgment was not about engineering. Its revenue was £6.13 billion in 2025, down from £6.57 billion, after about 1,000 of its roughly 3,500 UK roles were cut in July 2024, and its chief executive, Hanno Kirner, called US tariffs on its Malaysian- and Philippine-made products "particularly damaging" (reported). Vacuums and hair care were products worth making at Dyson's scale. A car was not.