Dyson boost for electric car as Toyota opts for UK production

The Dyson company is planning to hire an extra 300 engineers to work in the UK in a bid to realise its plans to launch an electric car by 2020.

Dyson’s electric car team to relocate

The firm best known its vacuum cleaners, which this week reported a 27 per cent in underlying earnings to £801 million in 2017, plans to relocate its electric car team from its Malmesbury HQ to a new R&D base in a nearby, disused airfield in Wiltshire.Sir James Dyson, the company founder, said, “Rather unusually for a company of its size, Dyson is run by engineers and our technology pervades everything we manufacture. It means we take a rather different approach; we have an unflinching focus on the performance of our products.“To stay ahead we reinvent and disrupt ourselves constantly; not just in our relationship with Dyson owners, but how we develop and manufacture our own technology too. People in Asia have an extraordinary enthusiasm for technology that works.“Although our centre of gravity has tilted that way, our cord-free vacuums, purifiers and hair dryers have been received enthusiastically all across the world.”The electric car project already has a 400-strong workforce and Dyson has doubled the number of scientists working on its battery programmes over the past year.Overall, Dyson has increased the size of its UK workforce by 2.5 times in the past five years to 4,600 although most of its products are now made in the Far East, where Japan, China, Taiwan and South Korea accounted for almost three-quarters of sales last year.Just where the electric car will be produced is still uncertain with the UK, Singapore, Malaysia and China all believed to be in contention as the location for a manufacturing plant.

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Toyota to produce Auris in UK

One vehicle that will definitely produced in Britain is the next generation of the Toyota Auris. Despite lingering concerns over the effects of Brexit, the Japanese auto giant announced on Wednesday that the car would be built at its Burnaston plant in Derbyshire with the majority of engines coming from its Deeside factory in north Wales.The announcement, part of a new, £240 million investment by Toyota in the UK, secures 3,000 jobs at the two plants.Johan van Zyl, the president and chief executive of Toyota Motor Europe, said the decision demonstrated the firm’s “confidence in the skills and capabilities” of its UK workers.He added, “As a company, we are doing what we can to secure the competitiveness of our UK operations as a leading manufacturing centre for our European business. “With around 85 per cent of our UK vehicle production exported to European markets, continued free and frictionless trade between the UK and Europe will be vital for future success.”

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Read more about the UK industry in the Winter issue of our magazine 

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