Dyson recently revealed plans to enter the automotive industry with its own electric car. While the news may have been quite a surprise, it wasn’t for Tesla, since Tesla actually learned about the plans two years ago. How is that possible? Blame the fact that both companies were vying for the same engineer.
The story dates back to 2015, where then Dyson engineer Pierre Pellerey was tasked with secretly helping Dyson put together its plans for an electric car. The only issue was that when the engineer became part of the secret group, he’d already received a pending job offer from Tesla. Pellerey reportedly didn’t tell Dyson, since the job offer was pending on getting a visa to work in the United States. Eventually Tesla found him a position in Europe to get around the visa issues and when he gave notice to Dyson, Dyson’s lawyers stepped in. Since Pellerey did not tell Dyson that he had already received an offer from Tesla, it set off a crazy, but secret court battle between the two companies.
“I felt a little uncomfortable about being involved in that project, as I knew I would be involved with electric vehicles at Tesla.”
Dyson eventually won won an injunction preventing Pellerey from working for Tesla for nine months. The details of the court battle were kept sealed until Dyson publicly announced its electric car ambitions in September.
Dyson is planning to invest at least $2.7 billion to bring its electric car to life by 2020.
Source: Automotive News
