Believe it or not, Chinese company Dreame is not the first vacuum cleaner manufacturer to dream (dreame?) of being a big player in electric vehicles. Britain’s Dyson had big plans to build seven-seat EVs with solid-state batteries—the company paid $90 million for Michigan battery startup Sakti3 in 2015, and planned a Singapore factory—but then abandoned the whole project in 2019.
But that was then. Dreame is a big player in smart home appliances, including the Aqua20 Pro Ultra Roller Complete, a steam robotic vacuum that puts “greasy mess worries to rest.” It was just one of many products it showed at a four-day Dreame Next launch event April 27-30 at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. The common thread is that they are all tech-enabled and AI-friendly.
The espresso machine with the Golden Extraction System was cool, but the main event on the 27th was the Dreame Nebula Next 01 Jet Edition, a concept and the ultimate iteration of the 01 EV first glimpsed at CES earlier this year. The Jet Edition is a “rocket-powered electric vehicle equipped with a custom-built dual solid-fuel rocket booster system,” capable of zero to 62 mph in a heart-stopping 0.9 seconds.
Would it be the fastest production car, if it actually went into production? The current champ is the Rimac Nevera, at 1.74 seconds to 60. That’s just ahead of the Tesla Model S Plaid Edition (1.99 seconds) and the Lucid Air Sapphire (1.8 seconds). Note that all of them are EVs.
The Dreame Nebula Next 01 Jet Edition combines an electric drivetrain with rocket power.
The Next 01 comes out of nowhere (well, China) to claim a vision for the future of high-performance EVs. Since the company has no background in producing automobiles for the road, some sort of taking it on faith is necessary. But China has hundreds of EV companies, and many of them are making great leaps forward. Dreame says its move into smart vehicles goes back 10 years.
What do we know about this all-wheel-drive supercar? It’s more about what we don’t know. The range with a solid-state lithium-sulfide battery pack of unknown size is 342 miles, but that’s on the Chinese test cycle, and it’s likely said range will vary depending on whether you order the two-, three- or four-motor variants.
The rocket booster system is supposed to respond in 150 milliseconds. The company says the car will sport DHX1, a next-generation LiDAR system that captures finely detailed images of road obstacles such as potholes and traffic signs. The company says its autonomous tech team envisions Level Four operation. Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford professor and veteran of the Google autonomous team, was at the launch and declared that he’d “never seen a product announcement as exciting as this.”
Another Dreame claim for the Next is smart weight- and space-saving battery packaging that eliminates the need for crossbeams and longitudinal beams in the pack itself. The EMAD electromagnetic active suspension system is reportedly capable of handling 14 degrees of freedom. There’s not much detail, but the fast-moving system is supposed to yield big dividends in cornering and reducing body roll. A brake-by-wire-system is also on board.
We may see a Dreame Nebula car, without rockets, for sale somewhere in 2027.
The rocket power is certainly futuristic, but not likely to be legal on our roads anytime soon. The real 1920s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang racer that inspired Ian Fleming used a 23-liter Maybach aero engine, but it wasn’t a rocket and nobody tried to use the vehicle as a grocery getter. According to Frank Markus in Motor Trend, “If you’re fretting about where a license plate would fit on the back of the 01 Jet Edition, don’t. Rocket power will likely never be road legal in any jurisdiction on earth for reasons Wile E. Coyote could explain to you.”
This doesn’t mean we’ll never see a Dreame Nebula car in North America, though tariffs are likely to keep it out of the US, unless—a long shot—Dreame builds a factory here. The Nebula Next 01, without rockets, is supposed to launch in 2027, price unknown.
Jim Motavalli is an auto writer and author (nine books) who contributes to Autoweek and Barron’s Mansion Global. He has written two books on electric cars, Forward Drive (2000) and High Voltage (2010), and hosts the Plugging In podcast.
Motavalli’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, CBS Moneywatch, Car Talk at NPR, Forbes, US News and World Report, Sierra Magazine, Audubon, and many more. In his spare time, he reviews books and jazz.
