Four months ago, Newmobility.news wondered whether Dreame’s rocket-powered hypercar was simply “too good to be true”. We now have an answer. Yes.
The Chinese vacuum-cleaner manufacturer is dismantling its car business, while former employees reveal that the spectacular vehicles used to promote it were far from functioning prototypes, as Dreame suggested.
This wasn’t entirely a fake car company. Dreame genuinely recruited hundreds of people from the automotive industry. Its ‘Star Project’ reportedly employed 700 to 800 people at one point and, according to Reuters, approached 1,000 at its peak.
An insider told the Chinese business outlet Yicai that the company initially intended to build cars and spent substantial money researching prospective customers. But what Dreame put on motor-show stages was another story.
A €380,000 show car that couldn’t drive
At CES in Las Vegas in January, Dreame presented the Nebula Next 01 alongside two Kosmera concepts. The four-door electric hypercar came with unusually precise claims: roughly 1,900 horsepower, four motors, 0-100 km/h in 1.8 seconds, a drag coefficient of 0.185 and torsional rigidity above 45,000 Nm/degree.
Yicai has now visited Dreame’s automotive offices in Suzhou and found one of the Nebulas covered up behind barriers in its underground car park. According to a company insider, it cannot be driven.
Dreame reportedly commissioned ten such display cars in different colors, each costing around 3 million yuan, or approximately €380,000.
China Economic Net goes further. Citing former Dreame automotive employees, the state-owned publication reports that the sports car exhibited in January lacked a proper chassis. It was moved using remote control.
Nebula Next 01 Jet Edition
The story of the even more spectacular Nebula Next 01 Jet Edition is stranger still. That car, unveiled in San Francisco in April, was supposedly capable of reaching 100 km/h in just 0.9 seconds using two solid-fuel rocket boosters generating a combined 100 kN of thrust.
According to China Economic Net, however, its starting point was a model vehicle bought for several million yuan from Shanghai Linli Model Company, a specialist model-making business.
Dreame subsequently fitted the purchased model with a chassis, powertrain and rocket propulsion hardware so that it could actually move and provide the desired visual effect. That is rather different from developing a 0.9-second production hypercar from scratch.
450 Wh/kg battery, but where was the car?
The claims didn’t stop at rockets. Dreame said the Jet Edition used a sulfide solid-state battery with an energy density of 450 Wh/kg – around twice that of conventional automotive lithium-ion cells – while still offering more than 550 kilometers of CLTC range.
It also announced steer-by-wire, an AI-powered autonomous-driving system, and an unusually advanced full-color LiDAR with a 600-meter range.
Some of these technologies may have been genuine development projects. Dreame separately showed solid-state battery cells earlier this year. But there is no evidence that all the technologies it described ever existed together in the functioning car that its presentation suggested.
Launch first, engineer afterward
So why spend millions building elaborate show cars?
The answer may lie in Dreame’s unusual corporate expansion model. Investigations by Chinese media describe a company that grew far beyond robot vacuum cleaners, expanding into more than 200 business units spanning everything from cars and smartphones to robotics and energy.
Former employees claim that attracting investment became a fundamental part of that model. China Economic Net quotes a former automotive employee who describes fundraising as the main objective, with R&D spending following once outside financing had been secured.
Other reports describe an almost reversed product-development process: determine when the launch event will take place, create something sufficiently convincing to show there, attract attention and capital, and then try to develop the actual product.
Seen through that lens, the €380,000 Nebulas start to make more sense. They weren’t necessarily cars intended to fool customers into placing an order tomorrow.
They were spectacular physical demonstrations of where Dreame said it wanted to go – and powerful tools for generating publicity, credibility and investor attention. Dreame even put its automotive ambitions into a reported $10 million Super Bowl commercial.
From almost 1,000 people to a few dozen
Eventually, however, the reality of the automotive industry caught up with the presentation.
According to Yicai, Dreame simultaneously explored three ways of reaching production: manufacturing cars itself, outsourcing production to an established automaker, and building a factory overseas. None materialized.
The much-publicized plan to manufacture cars in Europe, potentially near Berlin, consequently never progressed to production.
Layoffs started in May. Reuters now reports that the automotive workforce has shrunk from nearly 1,000 to only a few dozen people, largely in finance, legal and HR roles dealing with supplier payments and company closures.
“Adjusted” its exploratory businesses
Dreame itself uses softer language, saying it has “adjusted” its exploratory businesses and will concentrate its resources on smart homes, outdoor products, smart mobility, and embodied AI.
Was the Nebula therefore a hoax? Not quite. Dreame built a real automotive organization and apparently conducted real engineering work.
But the revelations show how easily the boundary between concept car and vaporware can disappear. Dreame marketed extraordinary specifications around cars that looked finished long before the engineering underneath them was.
The rocket car wasn’t entirely imaginary. The dream of turning it into a production car apparently was.
