Appliance giant Dyson is looking to venture outside the household by investing £200m into building a UK driverless vehicle campus.
The company will be redeveloping a Wiltshire airfield for its research purposes, offering plenty of space for testing driverless vehicles.
Several old World War Two-era air hangars will now be used for engineering work, housing up to 2,000 new employees at a site where Mosquitoes, Spitfires, and Lancaster bombers were once housed.
Jim Rowan, Dyson Chief Executive, comments:
“We are now firmly focused on the next stage of our automotive project strengthening our credentials as a global research and development organisation.”
Dyson is requesting permission to build over ten miles of vehicle test tracks. The varied terrain would be able to effectively test areas such as off-roading driving, handling slopes and hills, and dynamic handling.
Rowan adds the new site “will quickly become a world-class vehicle testing campus where we hope to invest £200m, creating more high-skilled jobs for Britain”.
This latest investment represents just part of Dyson’s £2 billion venture into electric vehicles. The company is aiming to bring the first of its vehicles to market by 2021.
Analysts, however, are sceptical of this timeline and regard it as being highly ambitious.
What are your thoughts on Dyson’s venture into driverless cars? Let us know in the comments.
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