The story
History
Sir Clive Sinclair was famous for pocket calculators and the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum home computers, and he had wanted to build an electric vehicle since the 1970s (more in electric microcars).source 1source 2 The idea went back to a holiday job at Solartron in the late 1950s. In the early 1970s, at Sinclair Radionics in St Ives, he had Chris Curry, later of Acorn, research electric vehicles; they fitted a thin motor to a child’s scooter before calculators took over.source 1 Around Christmas 1979 Sinclair hired Tony Wood Rogers, an engineer from the Radionics days, to study a one-person replacement for the moped, with a top speed of 30 mph, at least 30 miles’ range and a price of no more than £500. Development of this C1 moved to the University of Exeter in 1982 for wind-tunnel tests of glass-fibre shells. Ogle Design was hired to style it and engineer it for production, but Ogle’s car-like approach pushed the weight above 150 kg (330 lb), and by March 1983 the C1 had been stopped.source 1
That month Sinclair sold Sinclair Research shares in a £12 million deal and put £8.3 million into a new company, Sinclair Vehicles; Barrie Wills, formerly of DeLorean, became its managing director.source 1source 2source 3 The law had just moved his way. Electric vehicles had been freed from road tax in March 1980,source 1 and the Electrically Assisted Pedal Cycles Regulations 1983, in force from 12 August that year, took a new class of machine out of the definition of a motor vehicle. A tricycle qualified if it weighed no more than 60 kg, had pedals by which it could be propelled, and had no motor but an electric one of no more than 0.25 kW, which could not drive it faster than 15 mph.source 4 It needed no driving licence, road tax, insurance or helmet, and could be ridden from the age of 14.source 1source 5source 6 English Wikipedia says cycle makers such as Raleigh had lobbied for the change.source 1 Sinclair shrank his car to fit, as a single-seat electric three-wheeler, and planned it as the first of a family: a two-seat C10 and a C15 car were to follow.source 1source 6 One carmaker told The Economist in June 1983: “If it were anyone but Sinclair, we’d say he was bonkers.”source 1
Ogle, Lotus and Hoover
Ogle drew the three-wheeled C5, which looks related to its Bond Bug, and Wood Rogers chose handlebars under the driver’s knees so that getting in and out would be easy.source 1 Lotus was brought in in the autumn of 1983 to detail the design, build prototypes and test rigs, and test the car at MIRA; development took 19 months, in secret.source 1 Gus Desbarats, a 23-year-old graduate of the Royal College of Art, was given eight weeks to restyle the shell, having asked for four months, and added the High-Vis Mast, a tall reflective pole. He later described his job as “convert[ing] an ugly pointless device into a prettier, safer, and more usable pointless device”.source 1 More on Sinclair and his team is in the designers.
The chassis was two identical steel pressings joined top and bottom, with no suspension beyond the flex of the frame.source 1source 3source 2 The upper body was a single injection moulding in polypropylene, which Sinclair’s biographer Rodney Dale thought might be the largest of its type in Britain or the world; the two shells were joined with heated tape, the process used for the bumpers of the Austin Maestro.source 1 The 250 W motor came from Polymotor, an Italian subsidiary of Philips, and was developed from a lorry’s cooling-fan motor, not from a washing machine, whatever the story says. It drove one rear wheel through a belt and a freewheel, from a 12 V lead-acid battery.source 1source 3
Sinclair had thought of building it in the former DeLorean factory at Dunmurry, until DeLorean’s collapse ended that.source 1source 2 Instead the Welsh Development Agency introduced him to Hoover in the spring of 1983, and Hoover, drawn by Sinclair’s forecast of 200,000 a year rising to 500,000, agreed to build it at its washing-machine factory at Merthyr Tydfil.source 1source 5 The National Motor Museum gives the plan as 100,000 a year.source 6 The lines cost about £100,000 to set up and could build 50 an hour each, up to 8,000 a week, and a test rig loaded every C5 with a 12-stone (76 kg) dummy. Full production began in November 1984, and more than 2,500 had been built by early January.source 1source 3
Alexandra Palace, 10 January 1985
Six C5s, driven by women in grey and yellow, burst out of cardboard boxes at Alexandra Palace in north London. A £3 million advertising campaign began, and the price was £399 by mail order.source 1 Snow and ice covered the hill.source 1source 2 The press ride was, in the words of Sinclair’s historians Adamson and Kennedy, “an unqualified disaster”: batteries ran flat and motors overheated on the slopes, and Stirling Moss, trying one on the roads round the palace, ran out of charge on a hill.source 1 The Sunday Times called it a “Formula One bath-chair”; its reporter “had travelled five yards outdoors when everything went phut”. The Guardian’s motoring correspondent wrote: “On a sharp turn it too easily lifts a rear wheel, is hazardously silent, and low down.” The Daily Express, on the other hand, found it “stable, comfortable and easy to handle”, and The Engineer “a smashing big boy’s toy”.source 1
The safety lobby saw a driver whose head was at the height of a lorry’s tyres.source 1
I am shattered that within a few days 14-year-old children will be allowed to drive on the road in this Doodle Bug without a licence … without insurance and without any form of training.
Sinclair threatened to sue. His own view, given in 1985, was this: “I have qualms about seven-year-olds riding bicycles on the open road, but I have far fewer qualms about a 14-year-old driving one of these.”source 1
How it went
The driver reclines, steers with the bar under the knees and presses a thumb button for power; there is no speed control. The handbook advised pedalling to start, to spare the motor’s brushes, and on hills.source 1source 3 LED gauges showed the battery’s charge and the current drawn, and the last light gave ten minutes before the motor cut out; the electronics also cut it after four seconds at a stall.source 1 There is no reverse: you get out and lift the front round by hand.source 1 Sinclair claimed a range of 20 miles (32 km). The AA found about 10 miles in ordinary use and 6.5 on a cold day, and real speeds were about 12.5 mph (20 km/h).source 1 Its report of May 1985 concluded:
The C5 looks more comfortable and convenient than it really is – older cyclists looking for less pedal effort will be disappointed by the agility its layout demands. Although it is delightfully quiet, performance, range, and comfort do not compare with the better mopeds …
Which? was worse in June: all three of its test cars broke down with a “major gearbox fault”, the masts snapped, and the C5 was “too easy to steal”.source 1 Sinclair publicity had posed Desbarats in a C5 beside a cut-out Mini, to argue that its driver sat higher than a Mini’s.source 1 A modern tester, Sam Dawson of Classic & Sports Car, found it “incredibly fun to drive”.source 1
Eight months
Fewer than 200 were sold at the launch event, despite 20,000 visitors, but 5,000 went within four weeks by mail order to Sinclair’s computer customers. Shops took it from March 1985, Comet 1,600 of them.source 1 Then a fault in a gearbox moulding stopped production for three weeks, and it restarted at a tenth of its former rate, 100 a week instead of 1,000.source 1 By July, 8,000 had been sold, and that month the Advertising Standards Authority ordered the advertisements amended. Comet cut its price to £259.90, then to £139.99 with every accessory.source 1 An export drive failed when the Dutch authorities, among others, asked for better brakes, more reflectors and the mast as standard.source 1 In June Hoover issued a writ for over £1.5 million, never served, and in mid-August it stopped production.source 1source 3
Sinclair Vehicles was renamed TPD Ltd on 19 September 1985, receivers were appointed on 15 October, and it was liquidated on 5 November. The receivers reported 4,500 sold and 4,500 still in stock, and debts of £7.75 million, £7 million of them owed to Sir Clive himself.source 1
It was presented as a serious transport, when perhaps it should have been presented as a luxury product, an up-market plaything.
The plaything sold well enough. Ellar (Surplus Goods) Ltd of Liverpool bought the remaining stock at £75 each and sold nearly 7,000 at up to £700 as “a sophisticated toy”, and in 1987 Adam Harper bought 600 from a film company and resold them for up to £2,500.source 1 Neither successor was built: the C10 got only as far as a mock-up, and the C15 had been planned for the 1988 Birmingham show. Later Sinclair made the Zike (1992), and in 2017 his nephew Grant Sinclair showed the Iris eTrike.source 1 In 2005 Sir Clive’s verdict was that the C5 “was early for what it was”, and too low down for people to feel secure.source 1 It is a microcar only by courtesy, but it is the small electric vehicle that Britain remembers.
