Known as the "Apple of home appliances", Dyson, which once sold hair dryers out of stock, is now going to make energy storage batteries.
On May 3, Dyson announced that it would build a new factory in Singapore to produce Dyson batteries with patented technology and use them in new products developed by the company.
According to reports, Dyson's new factory covers an area equivalent to 53 basketball courts, which is the most significant investment Dyson has ever made in the field of advanced manufacturing and is expected to be fully operational by 2025.
This also means that there is another cross-border player in the field of batteries. Although this does not indicate whether Dyson will produce consumer batteries or power batteries, as well as specific technical routes, as part of Dyson's five-year investment plan, the new battery factory will probably focus on Dyson's long-term bullish solid-state battery technology. In November
2020, Dyson said publicly that the company would invest more in new technologies and products in the next five years.
In March 2022, Dyson moved its headquarters to Singapore to better access the Asian market. At present, Dyson has a technology innovation center and an advanced manufacturing center in Singapore, and employs about 1400 employees there. After the completion of the new battery factory, Dyson's territory in Asia will be further expanded.
There is no doubt that the battery market is crowded, and the list of crossover players is endless. In the highly competitive battery field, can Dyson rely on batteries to get a piece of the cake? Ccement. Com/richtext/IMG/4yvip68h90o1683514236306. Source: Dyson After the dream of
building a car was broken, Dyson bet on batteries
. The first thing that comes to mind is small household appliances such as hair dryers, vacuum cleaners and bladeless fans.
Founder James Dyson, now 76 years old, has many labels on his body: King of British Design, serial inventor, environmentalist, etc. Forbes magazine even called him "Modern Edison".
James Dyson got into the car business early. As an environmentalist, James Dyson developed an exhaust device to filter particulate matter in automobile exhaust 30 years ago to solve the problem of automobile exhaust, but it did not attract attention at that time.
electric vehicle can solve the problem of automobile exhaust from the source, which ignited James Dyson's dream of building a car.
Since 2013, Dyson has recruited from major automobile companies to form a technical team for automobile manufacturing.
In the choice of battery route, James Dyson is also one step ahead of solid-state battery technology, rather than non-traditional ternary lithium batteries. In October
2015, Dyson acquired Sakti3, a start-up company in Michigan, and spent $1.4 billion to build a solid-state lithium battery factory the following year.
Sakti3 is a company specializing in developing and manufacturing high-performance solid-state lithium-ion batteries, whose solid-state battery efficiency is nearly twice as high as that of the ternary lithium-ion battery technology at that time. At that time, there were predictions in the industry that Dyson was paving the way for car building.
In 2017, Dyson formally entered the field of automobile manufacturing. The company announced that it would launch a electric vehicle called Digital Motor, saying that the first car might be equipped with solid-state battery technology, and then hired technicians from famous car companies such as Rolls-Royce, Tesla and Jaguar Land Rover to form a development team of more than 500 people. In May
2019, Dyson released several patent drawings related to electric vehicles, which has become one of the few public product information since the disclosure of Dyson's car-making project. The drawings show that this will be a car about 5 meters long. Car height 1.
a time, obviously underestimated the complexity behind the car-making plan, which brought the vigorous car-making plan to an abrupt end after six years of preparation.
In 2019, James Dyson announced in an internal email that Dyson would abandon the electric car plan on the grounds that it was "not commercially viable". The company will also close electric vehicle plants in the UK and Singapore and place project workers in the production of products such as vacuum cleaners, fans and hair dryers.
"We really should learn from our mistakes, but we should be more free to make mistakes." James Dyson said earlier.
Although the 2.5 billion pound car-making project was "wasted", it did not dampen James Dyson's enthusiasm as a scientist.
Today, Dyson has not removed the official website page of the electric vehicle product, which reads: "Stop is a difficult decision, hundreds of engineers, scientists and designers have poured everything into this project to make it a great engineering achievement.".
But we have no regrets about starting this project and have learned a lot from it. Dyson has also benefited from the influx of engineering talents from the automotive industry, and these experiences have been quickly applied to other areas of our research and development.
James Dyson said that in the future, the company will turn its attention to solid-state batteries, as well as the research and development of vision systems, machine learning and artificial intelligence related technologies .
James Dyson also said in his memoir Innovation: A Life that another major reason why the company abandoned its car-making plan was that the team needed to invest heavily in Dyson's solid-state battery technology and put it into production.
In solid-state batteries, the thickness of solid-state electrolyte is only 3-4 microns, which is very thin and light, can reduce the size and weight of the battery at the same time, and because of the higher initial temperature of runaway, it theoretically eliminates the potential safety hazards such as battery combustion.
At present, the batteries of new energy vehicles are mainly liquid lithium batteries, and the improvement space of these batteries in energy density, weight and other aspects is about to reach the bottleneck, the market urgently needs to find new battery technology.
Solid-state batteries, with their advantages of high energy density, high safety and greater process optimization space, are considered by the industry to be the "holy grail" of lithium batteries.
"The day when solid-state batteries are popularized is the time when fuel vehicles withdraw from the historical stage." This sentence was once circulated in the new energy automobile circle. It can be said that solid-state batteries are the key technology to compete for the voice of future electric vehicles.
According to the classification of electrolytes, lithium batteries can be divided into four categories: liquid, semi-solid, quasi-solid and all-solid, of which semi-solid, quasi-solid and all-solid are collectively referred to as solid-state batteries. The development of solid-state batteries adopts the strategy of gradual subversion. With the gradual decrease of liquid electrolyte content, all-solid-state batteries without any liquid electrolyte will be the final form.
The report also points out that due to the high production cost, the breakthrough of solid-state battery technology and the mature production line will be 2030, and the first deployment will be limited to high-end models.
Some people in the industry have analyzed the economy of solid-state batteries, saying that compared with the existing ordinary lithium batteries, solid-state batteries have no advantages.
On the one hand, compared with the existing mature liquid lithium batteries, the technology of solid-state batteries has changed dramatically, and the battery supply chain needs to be reshaped; on the other hand, the production cost of raw materials for solid-state batteries is much higher than that of the current corresponding materials, and it is more difficult to reduce the cost. For example, the price of solid electrolyte lithium sulfide is about 5-10 times that of lithium carbonate.
Even though Dyson has many years of experience in solid-state battery research and development, Dyson, who has previously stumbled in the car-making plan, is bound to be more cautious in the process of battery commercialization. Dyson is not the only company
interested in solid-state batteries, and Apple has also entered the market before.
In 2015, Infinite Power Solutions (IPS), an American solid-state battery manufacturer, was acquired by Apple and began to study solid-state batteries for wearable devices, but there has been no major action since.
From the point of view of battery production, too many enterprises have poured into the track of solid-state batteries, and their strength is not bad. Ningde Times, Samsung, LG, Panasonic and other battery manufacturers, as well as Toyota, Hyundai, Volkswagen, BMW and other automotive brands, have made sustained efforts in the research and development of solid-state batteries, but in the face of this difficult bone, all manufacturers have some difficulties. Zeng Yuqun, chairman
of Ningde Times, also said publicly this year: "There are many basic scientific and technological problems in solid-state batteries that have not yet been solved. Our company has been working hard for more than 10 years, but still believes that it is difficult to form products with technical feasibility and market competitiveness."
On the eve of the commercialization of solid-state batteries, it is still unknown who can "eat crabs", and the curtain of the future battery war has just opened.
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