A historic British airfield, which was home base to 1,000 aircraft by the end of World War II, is on its way to a second life: as an electric car test track for the vacuum company Dyson. Today, Dyson submitted plans to the local U.K. government to transform 750 acres of the airfield into a $260 million testing ground for electric vehicles–a step closer to its goal of having its cars on the road by 2021.
It’s an ambitious plan for the 27-year-old British company, which mostly focused on building vacuums until announcing it would be spending $2.8 billion to build an electric car in 2017. Much of Dyson’s bet on electric cars is based on its purported development of solid state batteries, which are the next big technological advance beyond today’s commonly used lithium batteries. But building a car from scratch, let alone mass manufacturing one, is no easy task. This test track is the first big piece of infrastructure Dyson is building to support its automotive dreams.
The entire site is located at Hullavington Airfield, which was built in 1937, just before World War II, where it quickly became a hub for British air operations. It closed in 1992, when the British army took over the site. Its buildings, influenced by the Bauhaus as well as architects like Le Corbusier, were designated a conservation site by nonprofit Historic England, which describes it as embodying “to a unique degree, the improved architectural quality associated with the post-1934 expansion of the [Royal Air Force].”
