Dyson has confirmed it will launch a battery-powered electric car in 2020.

The vacuum cleaner company, which will spend £2 billion on the project, says its vehicles will be "radical and different".

Sir James Dyson has decided against revealing any specific information about the vehicle, but the announcement had been expected for some time.

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"We've started building an exceptional team that combines top Dyson engineers with talented individuals from the automotive industry," he wrote in a letter to employees. "The team is already over 400 strong, and we are recruiting aggressively. I'm committed to investing £2bn on this endeavour.

"The project will grow quickly from here but at this stage we will not release any information. Competition for new technology in the automotive industry is fierce and we must do everything we can to keep the specifics of our vehicle confidential."

The company will be entering a crowded market that Tesla, Nissan, BMW and many more car manufacturers are striving for dominance in.

According to Sir James, a team at his company began work on a cyclonic filter that could be fitted to a vehicle's exhaust system "to trap particulates" back in March 1990, but the project was stopped a few years later, as "nobody at the time was interested" in the system.

"At this moment, we finally have the opportunity to bring all our technologies together into a single product," he said.

"Rather than filtering emissions at the exhaust pipe, today we have the ability to solve it at the source."

Citing a study by King’s College London, he added that thousands of people die every year in the capital alone due to long-term exposure to air pollution.