Why Dyson failed

Had he bet the farm on making such a breakthrough happen, only to find it harder than expected? Other car companies say that they have had such batteries on test beds for years, but cannot find a way to make productionising them reliably financially viable. Perhaps Dyson hit the same problems.

2. The competition caught up

Maybe, just maybe, Dyson was on to something that could put it ahead of the game - but just as likely is the fact that the mega-budget car makers have closed the gap in the years since he announced his project.

Such is the pace at which the car industry is changing that it’s hard to keep an eye on context, but in the past few years, the Volkswagen Group has committed close to £50 billion to EV research and Toyota has intimated that it has done the same. Other car makers, especially premium German-branded ones, are not far behind. This makes Dyson’s £2bn commitment look a bit paltry.

Could it be - particularly given the high-level advisory board and senior engineers recruited - that Dyson learnt that his breakthrough technology was about to be matched or even superseded by what’s in the pipeline elsewhere? And that the run rate elsewhere would leave his technology with an incredibly short shelf life that meant it would never recoup its investment, let alone generate enough income to keep the required R&D run rate? Maybe someone learnt that Toyota’s pledge to release solid-state technology early into the next decade was about to bear fruit?

Given that whatever he created needed to not just match but beat the opposition to be given any hope of success, there was always a risk that his moment would pass while preparing for it.

3. Dyson could design the car to a budget, but not build the supply chain

The timing of the canning of the project is intriguing, because Dyson was in the late stages of ramping up for production, with teams employed and premises being prepared. To have got this far only to perform a volte-face suggests James Dyson is either a huge risk taker or that something of substance changed.

Given James Dyson’s warm words for the car that has been designed while announcing the project's death yesterday, there is a suggestion that it is the more mundane realities of productionising the prototypes that has led to here. Certainly, the timeline of the project suggests that the intersection between development and production should have been crystallising now.

Could it be that the supply chain into Singapore, a location chosen for its proximity to the booming tariff-free Chinese market for electric cars, was not as seamless as anticipated? Don’t forget, many a car company has failed for failing to pin these details down, and that for start-ups, the challenge is intensified by the fact that they don't have decades of continuous improvement within their DNA. As Tesla has found to its cost, the car industry knows what it's doing when it comes to mass production to near faultless levels.