Dyson confirmed Tuesday it will build electric cars at a new plant in Singapore.
The British firm, famous for its line of bagless vacuum cleaners, said construction of the plant will be completed by 2020 and that the first cars should be rolling off the line by the following year.
It's been a year since Dyson announced plans to build an electric car, something founder and chief engineer James Dyson has been hinting at since at least 2008. The company has committed $2.7 billion to the project and has already established an engineering center with 10 miles of test track in the United Kingdom.
Singapore isn't a low-cost manufacturing location and currently doesn't have any car plants. However, the country sits in the middle of some of the world's busiest shipping lanes and has a free trade agreement with key EV market China. Dyson already has a plant in Singapore for electric motors and a plant for home appliances in neighboring Malaysia.
Dyson's announcement comes only a week after it was revealed that Tesla had bought a site near Shanghai for its Chinese plant.
Dyson hasn't revealed any details on its electric car. It's thought that more than one model is planned, and to help get the first one to market faster it is possible Dyson may use lithium-ion batteries rather than more advanced solid-state batteries. Solid-state batteries weigh less and promise much greater range than lithium-ion batteries, but so far no one has managed to manufacture them at the scale necessary for cars. Toyota is the only company to give a timeline for the launch of electric cars with solid-state batteries. It said last December that it aims to have the batteries available by the early 2020s.
