Tech Time Warp of the Week: The Electric Tricycle That Was the Tesla of the 1980s

Elon Musk made his fortune at PayPal. But he’s probably best known for his audacious projects like SpaceX, Hyperloop, and, of course, Tesla Motors.

Tesla has helped bring electric vehicles closer to the mainstream than ever, and the Model S was met with near universal acclaim. Apple shareholders are even asking Tim Cook to buy the company. But when Musk was still a teenager, another tech tycoon took a run at shaking up the automotive industry with an electric vehicle.

It didn’t work.

Sir Clive Sinclair was the man behind the ZX Spectrum—a home computer from the early 1980s that was essentially the Commodore 64 of the UK. After being knighted in 1983, Sinclair decided to take the fortune he’d made in the computer industry and spend it on reinventing transportation.

The result was the Sinclair C5, released in 1985, which you can see in action in the infomercial embedded above. Yes, it looked like a bumper car, but the electric trike had an advertised range of about 20 miles—plenty for running errands around town—and parking was a snap. And it was cheap. It cost just £399, and you didn’t a license, registration or even insurance to drive it on the road. It was, in theory, the perfect vehicle for the urban driver on a budget. But it was a total flop.

What the infomercial conveniently avoids mentioning is that if you wanted to take the C5 up a hill, you’d have to pedal. Actually, if all you knew about the C5 is what you saw in that video, you could be forgiven for not realizing that it had pedals at all.

And really, that’s just the start of what was wrong with the thing. Its lack of a roof made driving it in the winter unappealing, and the “one size fits all” design wasn’t particularly comfortable. But what really doomed it was that it was so low to the ground that people felt terrified of driving it in traffic.

You can get a pretty detailed look at a restored C5, warts and all, in the video below.

Although the C5’s failure put an end to Sinclair Vehicles, Sinclair himself was largely undeterred. He has continued to develop new products under the guise of Sinclair Researching, including an electric bicycle—the Zike—in 1992 and a folding bike called the A-bike in 2006. In 2010, he announced a successor to the C5 called the X-1 that was to be released the next year. We’re still waiting, but who knows. Maybe an electric tricycle will give Elon Musk a run for his (vast amount of) money after all.