Thank Frankel it’s Friday: Lamenting the loss of the Dyson electric car

There are plenty of other reasons to lament this loss beyond the absence of any product from the market. Hundreds of people employed by Dyson, many of them fine engineers sourced from great car companies, will have slept less well in their beds last night. Thousands more will now never get to apply for jobs that will now never be created. And millions of people will never get even to see, let alone sample, what was rumoured to be perhaps one of the most technologically advanced and innovatively designed electric cars seen to date.

And finally, and with all respect to those massive automotive corporate juggernauts that are already steaming into the EV market, the death of the Dyson car surely means other brave, ambitious companies, brimming with ideas and not in the least set in their ways will now surely be deterred from following in Dyson’s footsteps. The electric cars the establishment will produce will doubtless be very well engineered, effective and easy to live with. But do you think they are going to put their reputations on the line and leap into the conceptual unknown? Nor me. When Henry Ford made the Model T, he was famously quoted as saying ‘if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.’ But these days no mainstream manufacturer makes a damn thing without clinic-ing the hell out of it first, so we’re looking at a future of electric horses.

But just as Dyson never quite reached the surface, what of those that have slipped below the waves? Which would bring back?

Actually, the exhumation of names from the past is a fraught business and a distinction needs to be drawn between companies that go bust, get bought and put back into production under new ownership with continuity intact (like, say, Bentley in 1931), and those which are revived years or decades later, with no continuity of ownership.

Look at what happened to Mercedes-Benz’s attempt to establish Maybach as a standalone brand in 2002. Maybach hadn’t made a road car since before the war and few had even heard about it, let alone cared. The cars were exquisitely engineered, but sales disasters. And who knows if VW has yet even come close to recovering the money it spent re-launching Bugatti.

In Britain there have been attempts to revive Jensen, Invicta and even Lea-Francis, none with notable success. I’m sure there are plenty of other car brands upon which certain brave individuals would love to take a punt, but most of those name you’d have heard of (which means they might be of some commercial value) are owned by large overseas concerns not that interested in either using the names themselves, or licencing them to others.

But if there was one British brand you could bring back, which would it be? For me it would be Austin-Healey in a heartbeat. I love the name, the image, the heritage. More than that I love the positioning of the brand: a high quality but not unaffordable product, definitively British, catering for an audience of robust enthusiasts who love to drive even more than they love to be seen driving.

There aren’t enough cars like that. There are no MGs worthy of the Octagon and a Jaguar F-Type is just a bit too expensive. A two seat, front-engined, rear-drive Austin Healey powered by a straight-six engine to take the fight to the likes of the Porsche Boxster could be a simply brilliant car and, unlike Maybach, I think there is enough resonance left in the name for it to still be popular. But it will never happen.

Still, as someone else once said, ‘’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” Though it seems unlikely that Alfred Lord Tennyson was comparing the relative fates of the Dyson car and Austin-Healey at the time.