Dyson decides to build its electric vehicles in Singapore, solid-state batteries become less likely

Dyson, best known for its vacuums, is still moving forward with its multi-billion-dollar plan to launch several new electric vehicles.

The British company has now announced that it will build the cars in Singapore and those vehicles are unlikely to be equipped with solid-state batteries.

Earlier this year, Dyson started converting an airfield into an electric car R&D hub with a massive test track.

It gave some hope to locals that they might establish production in the UK, but the company confirmed this week that it is going to Singapore of all places.

The country sounds like an unlikely place for auto manufacturing since it doesn’t have a single car factory, but Dyson already has 1,100 employees in the city-state. They told BBC that “the decision was based on the availability of engineering talent, regional supply chains and proximity to some key target markets.”

James Dyson, the founder of Dyson, is a known proponent of Brexit while his company doesn’t have manufacturing capacity in the UK.

Dyson has long been rumored to be working on its own electric vehicle. The rumors intensified when the company acquired Michigan-based solid-state battery startup Sakti3 for $90 million and announced plans to build an important $1 billion battery factory to mass produce the next generation battery technology.

The company later confirmed the plans in an email to employees.

Dyson also confirmed that it is investing £2 billion ($2.7 billion USD) to bring electric vehicles to market and earlier this year, we learned that they are actually planning to produce 3 all-electric vehicles and they could skip solid-state batteries for the first generation.

Recently, it started to look like Dyson was moving away from its solid-state technology and the company has now written-off almost its entire investment in Sakti3. Bosch recently did the same with its own solid-state battery startup.

It’s still unclear at this point if Dyson’s EVs will be equipped with solid-state batteries or regular li-ion battery cells.

They aim to break ground on the new factory later this year and they want the first car to roll off the production line in 2021, which is a fairly aggressive timeline.