Not all of Sir James Dyson’s failures have resulted in a font of learnings. But even failures can have a silver lining.
The billionaire British inventor helped reshape what people expect from home appliances, particularly the modern vacuum cleaner. His company’s history is one of overcoming failures and rejections to create successful products.
However, some of Dyson’s visions never got past the prototype phase. In 2014, the company decided that it would work on building an electric car since it already manufactured electric motors for its existing products. By 2019, though, the project was scrapped, as it was “no-longer commercially viable,” Dyson wrote in a 2020 blog post.
“Everybody said, ‘You know, you must have learned a lot from that experience,’ and the answer is I learned absolutely nothing,” Dyson told podcast host David Senra in a Monday episode of his show.
Dyson spent about $750 million on research and development for its electric car. Then came the 2016 “Dieselgate” scandal in which Volkswagen was called out for misleading “clean diesel” ads, triggering billions in fines and reshaping the global auto industry. As automotive companies jumped into making EVs, Dyson said they became more expensive to produce.
It was “fun to do,” Dyson said, and it produced one model in its Singapore office and a somewhat drivable prototype in one of the company’s hangars.
“It was a difficult decision to stop, because hundreds of engineers, scientists and designers, had poured everything into the project and it was a great engineering achievement,” Dyson said in the blog post.
However, the company said it simply couldn’t afford to invest the money into overcoming the “huge disadvantages” that come along with only manufacturing EVs. He pointed to one competitor that had the funds to do so, and it’s still around today.
“Tesla overcame that through sheer scale and might and investment, but we didn’t have that sort of money,” Dyson said on the podcast. “We couldn’t take that sort of risk, so we stopped it.”
“Sadly, we didn’t really learn anything from it,” Dyson said.
Building an EV isn’t an easy undertaking even for companies that have billions to pour into research and development. In 2024, Apple reportedly decided to sunset its electric car project after pushing back the car’s launch date to 2028 amid production challenges.
Dyson has previously said that he doesn’t regret pursuing an EV even if nothing came of it. It brought in talented engineers, and while half the people who worked on the project ended up leaving for other manufacturers, the other half were put back to work on vacuum cleaners, Dyson said.
A Dyson spokesperson told Business Insider that the inventor believes “passionately in the importance of failure.”
“The project brought a significant influx of talented engineers and scientists into Dyson, and those engineers have contributed to many successes across Dyson’s R&D, with their expertise strengthening Dyson’s innovation in multiple areas,” the spokesperson added.
Although Dyson said he doesn’t test drive the prototype anymore, there is one scrapped project that remains close to Dyson’s heart — or at least useful in his day-to-day life.
The Dyson CR01 Contrarotator is a washing machine that was discontinued in 2005 after it failed to gain traction with a $1,300 price tag that dwarfed that of the competition. However, Dyson said he still uses his.
“I use them,” Dyson said. “It’s great, and people have now copied a lot of the ideas, like the big door.”
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