Dyson is driving forward with its electric car ambitions - but is it heading for a crash?

Even then, Dyson wouldn’t confirm its plans. With the chief executive at the time, Max Conze, only saying that the business was “ruling nothing out”.

It was in September last year that Dyson finally confirmed it was working on an electric car. Since then the company has given few details, saying only that it will be a “premium” vehicle with a “radical” design.

Sir James, who is estimated to be worth almost £10bn, has put about £2.5bn into the car project and says he has been “pursuing this dream” since 1998.

He became interested in the area when he saw pollution from diesel engines. Eventually, he adapted the cyclone technology in his vacuums to reduce emissions, though his ideas failed to gain commercial traction within the industry.

Making such a large investment in the sector shows how serious Dyson is about producing an electric car, and Sir James has so far recruited 400 engineers and designers to work on it.

Heavyweight talent he’s attracted includes Ian Robertson, a former member of BMW’s management board and the most senior Britain ever to work at the German company.

Dyson has also acquired a 500-acre former RAF airfield near the company headquarters and is planning to build tracks for the cars to be tested on. Staff working on the electric vehicle project will also be based there.

Tuesday’s announcement of a factory in Singapore to produce the cars, which the company says will be launched in 2021, further highlight Dyson’s intent.

Combined with the obvious benefits of building on the engineering experience the Dyson built up producing batteries and ground-breaking high-speed electric motors for its vacuums and hand driers, it signals that Sir James wants to be at the forefront of the electric vehicle revolution.

But beyond the odd accidental admission and the few scraps Dyson is willing to put into the public domain, next to nothing is known about the company’s plans.

It’s been reported that the initial range will consist of three cars, none of which will be a sports car, according to Sir James, suggesting some sort of common platform.

Dyson’s extensive use of high-strength and lightweight plastics in its consumer products is expected to extend into the cars, with the billionaire suggesting that this will allow them to look “quite different” to current designs.

Originally Dyson aimed to use battery technology developed in-house - possibly solid-state power cells rather than the lithium-ion type used by the current generation of electric vehicles.

However, the company has since indicated that it is willing to go to third-party suppliers, like the vast majority of the car industry.

Dyson is investing more than £2bn on developing the electric car, an amount that won't go far in the electric vehicle sector, according to analysts.

“In the car industry £2bn is small change,” said Professor David Bailey, an automotive industry expert at Aston University. “Just look at how much Tesla has burned through and they haven’t made a profit.”

To give a sense of scale, Elon Musk’s electric car company spent $3.5bn over the past 12 months alone and last year Volkswagen Group revealed a €34bn investment plan.

VW, the world’s biggest car company by sales, has stated it wants to be the global leader in electric mobility by 2025, and has an industrial footprint that dwarves all but a few players in the sector.

“I’m surprised Dyson has not tried to find partners,” added Mr Bailey. “Maybe they have a technology that is radically different and don’t want to share it.”

However, if it’s in the battery field, this seems unlikely. Last month Dyson wrote off its investment in Sakti 3.

Working with an established supplier could also smooth the path for Dyson. Cars are hard to build - something which Tesla has been finding out to its cost, with vehicles coming off its line needing extensive “rework” to get them to a standard where they are acceptable to customers.

While the decision to build Dyson’s cars in Singapore might be politically unpopular - Sir James is a high-profile Brexiteer - it may give the business an extra edge. The island nation’s industrial policy sets out a strong desire to carve out a place in the electric car market, and it’s highly likely Dyson will have been heavily incentivised to set up there, either through direct investment or tax breaks which could be worth hundreds of millions.

And then there’s scale. According to reports, the production run is likely to be very low in industry terms, the low thousands at first, before scaling up as the range expands.

As such a niche player, it’s hard to see how the business model can be sustainable, especially when Chinese electric car companies - which are operating in the world’s biggest market for electric vehicles with strong backing from Beijing - are looking to dominate the sector.

However, some very small players do thrive; the British motor industry is unique in the amount of niche car businesses it is home to, with some turning out just a few cars a year. The recent £4.3bn flotation of Aston Martin which sold just 5,200 sports cars last year, shows that the right product has a home.

But the market Dyson has chosen to enter also presents problems. Sir James has said his car “won’t be cheap” meaning that it’s going to competing with the well-established BMW, Jaguar and Mercedes, all of whom know the premium market inside out and already have their own electric cars on offer.

Still, it would be a mistake to simply write off Sir James’s electric car adventure as a rich man’s folly.

“It’s repeatedly said that the next 10 years will see more change in the car industry than the past 100 years because of disruptive new technology,” says Mr Bailey. “Those companies that don’t embrace the change are going to get crushed - and Dyson’s certainly a disruptor.”