Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - The False Dawn of the Electric Car

Episode Date: April 8, 2022

Sir Clive Sinclair was a computer whizz and business mogul to rival Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. He was a visionary who could do no wrong... until he tried to launch an electric vehicle.The C5 “electrically assisted pedal cycle" doesn't seem so outlandish to us now... but 1985 just wasn't ready for the "aerodynamic bathtub" on wheels. Sir Clive was ridiculed and his business ruined. How did it all go so wrong?For a full list of sources go to timharford.comIf you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to sign up for our email list at Pushkin.fm. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The 10th of January 1985 is a typical winter's day in London. The temperature is edgy and above freezing, but only just. A thin covering of snow is starting to melt. A mix of salt and slush covers the roads. Members of the media are making their way to the grand surrounds of Alexandra Palace, a landmark Victorian concert and exhibition hall, for the launch of a new product. They're not sure what the product is, but they're intrigued because it's the brainchild of Sir Clive Sinclair, one of Britain's most innovative entrepreneurs. Sir Clive made his mind in technology. His ZX81 and ZX Spectrum computers have been wildly successful.

Everyone wants to know what he'll do next, and the rumor is that he's making a car. The journalists take their seats in an auditorium. Sir Clive's staff buzzed nervously around. Young women in stylish grey jumpsuits hand out press releases. The anticipation is palpable. A good morning ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for coming to this press conference today. Sir Clive Sinclair is 44 years old. Bald, bespectacled with a ginger beard, he looks like an archetypal geek.

Appearances can deceive. Sir Clive loves poetry and wild parties. But he's certainly smart, at least by some measures. He's the chairman of Mensa, the British society for people with a high IQ. Sinclair's IQ is 159, which puts him roughly on a par with Einstein. I'm going to start in a rather unusual fashion by telling you what we're not announcing today,

because there have been some fairly confusing leaks. We're not announcing a conventional car. Sinclair Vehicle's Limited is dedicated to the development and production of a full range of electric cars, but today we have an electric vehicle, the first stage on the road to the electric car. Okay, so he's not launching a car right now, but he is planning them. He's announcing an electric vehicle. So he's not launching a car right now, but he is planning them. He's announcing an electric vehicle. What could that mean? The journalists are getting even more intrigued because they have indeed been some confusing leaks.

They've heard that Sinclair engaged the sports carmaker Lotus to help with the design of this mysterious vehicle. That's exciting. James Bond drives a Lotus. The one pure sport for us isn't it nice. And apparently the vehicle is being manufactured by Hoover at a factory that also makes washing machines. There have been several reports that the vehicle is made of fiberglass. In fact, it's not. The body is the world's largest mass-produced injection molding.

It's astonishingly light and astonishingly strong, molded in the ICI Wonder Plastic polypropylene, which has absolutely marvelous properties for a vehicle. Another fallacy is that the vehicle is powered by a washing machine motor. True, the Italian company that makes these motors does make washing machine motors, but they also make torpedo motors. A torpedo, sleek and powerful. As Sir Clive built up to the big reveal of the mysterious Sinclair C5, that is the mental connotation he wanted people to have.

Not washing machine. Torpedo. Alas, it was all too appropriate. The C5 was about to torpedo Sir Cliveives career. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to Corsion Retails. Clive Sinclair was a teenager when he first began to dream about cheap, pollution-free, electric transportation. He got a summer internship at a local electronics company and pitched some ideas there. But this was a company that made spectrometers and oscilloscopes. They went about to start a transport revolution. Besides, nobody then thought electric vehicles were practical outside of one very particular niche, the milk float. Around the country, these boxy vehicles would glide along the pre-dawn streets,

bringing milk to people's doorsteps. They were almost silent, so they wouldn't wake you up. They were slow, which was fine when you wanted to stop at every house. But it was hard to imagine using an electric vehicle for anything else. Sinclair left school at 18. He didn't bother with university. He had already taught himself everything there was to know about electronics. He got a job writing for hobbyist magazines, but what he really wanted to do was invent. And for that, he'd need money.

His break in business came when he heard that a high-end electronics firm called Plessy had rejected a big batch of metal alloy transistors, an essential building block of electronic circuits. Sinclair realised that although the transistors had failed Plessy's quality control, many might still work well enough for hobbyists to tinker with. He bought them wholesale at a knockdown price and handed them on to his wife. The transistors used to arrive in SACs, about the size of a sack of potatoes. I had test equipment consisting of a box that gave a different pitched buzz according to the transistor, and I must have tested a million of them altogether. It really became monotonous because I'd know soon I finished one side then, another would

turn up. Sinclair radionics went from strength to strength in the 1960s, selling DIY kits for enthusiasts to build ingenious little devices that Sinclair designed, such as pocket radios. With money coming in, Sinclair invented. He tried putting a motor on a scooter and rode it around his office. But soon another brainchild took all his attention, the pocket calculator. Like his radios, they were tiny, the size of a packet of cigarettes, and they were cheap.

Sinclair's calculators were a huge success. True, some of his inventions failed, pocket televisions never really took off as it hoped. Digital watches did, but Sinclair's watches had production problems. Sinclair had to sit on the sidelines as other watchmakers prospered. But it was micro computers that made Clive Sinclair's name. They were genuinely revolutionary, smaller and cheaper than anything the market had seen. His fantastically popular ZX Spectrum launched at a 6th of the price of an Apple II. In the first half of the 1980s, Sinclair sold about 5 million computers around the world. More than Apple, more than IBM. Only the American firm Commodore sold more.

Fortune Magazine sent a reporter to investigate. The world's top producer of tiny computers is a slightly astonished English company headquartered in a jumble of tiny rooms and vertichnest staircases across from Gothic King's College Cambridge. Estonished or not, Clive Sinclair was now right up there with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

He seemed to be demonstrating that geeky brits could rule the high-tech world. He was a regular guest of the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street. The Queen awarded him a knighthood. One British government official explained to the New York Times that Sir Clive seemed to have a gift for thinking of new things that seem obvious after he's done them. The average entrepreneur may have one such idea. Clive has had a string of them. And there was something Sinclair had dreamed of making since he was a teenager. One thing, Sinclair had dreamed of making since he was a teenager, electric cars. The time now seemed ripe.

After the oil price shocks of the 1970s, government planners were starting to wander about alternatives to gasoline. Sinclair sketched out plans for a compact two-seat car for urban travel and proper full-sized electric cars for doing long journeys at motorway speeds. But he decided to build up to this ground vision by starting small. Sinclair had spotted a gap in the market. A lot of journeys were short and solitary, getting to the railway station for the morning commute, going to the shops. getting to the railway station for the morning commute, going to the shops. Research showed that the average car travelled just 13 miles a day, gasoline powered mopeds, even less. There was clearly an opportunity to offer a smaller, cheaper, battery-powered alternative way to make those journeys.

Sinclair started to develop ideas for a small electric vehicle. The first stage on the road to the electric car, as it later put it at the launch, then came an unexpected opportunity. The British government published new regulations that created a new category of vehicle, the electrically assisted pedal cycle. To drive a car on British roads, he had to pay an annual tax and insurance and have a license. Electrically assisted pedal cycles would be exempt from all that.

He wouldn't even have to wear a crash helmet and you could drive them aged just 14. Sinclair was excited. He realised that the vehicle he had been developing could easily be tweaked to fit with these new regulations. He'd just need to add pedals so it would technically be a pedal cycle and it'd have to reduce the maximum speed from 30mph to 15mph. He could do that. Sir Clive was determined to keep the details

of his new vehicle a secret from the public until he was ready to surprise them with a big launch event. When he needed partners such as Lotus or Hoover, he approached them in strictest confidence. The reaction was always the same. They were skeptical. But he expected that. If an idea is good enough, it's going to appear pretty crazy to almost everybody. Then the skeptics tried out the prototype, and they loved it. The C5 was terrific

fun to drive. Everyone who tried it agreed. Sinclair invited regulators from the department for transport to look at his new vehicle and make sure they were satisfied that it met their regulations. They were startled. What was this thing? It didn't look like a pedal cycle. Still, they had to admit it met the regulations to the letter. It was becoming harder and harder to keep his design under wraps. More and more confusing rumors were starting to circulate about Sinclair's plans for electric cars. He decided he couldn't delay the reveal of the Sinclair C5 any longer.

He booked Alexandra Palace and invited the press. It's a very nerve-wracking time. I could lose all my money. I don't mind not having any money, but it would be annoying in the sense that I couldn't do what I want to do. Everyone was on tentahooks to see what Sir Clive had been working on. Imagine if Bill Gates or Steve Jobs had suddenly decided at the height of their success to disrupt the auto industry by making a totally new kind of vehicle. It was bound to be something good, wasn't it? In a dapper blue suit on a cold January morning, Sir Clive Sinclair is building up the mysterious

Sinclair C5 to the assembled British media. Almost everything has been designed and tools from scratch for us. The lights, batteries, motors, electronic control system, we have a custom chip that monitors everything and controls everything. Get into the vehicle and you don't have to think about it. It's all done for you. At last, it's time for the big reveal. Around the arena, a six boxes covered with sheets of paper at the front.

Simultaneously, six Sinclair C5s burst through the paper, driven by more young women in grey jumpsuits, music booms, cameras flash, six C5s complete a circuit of the room and come to halt in a line. A Sinclair C5. If you've never seen one, how do I describe it? You can start by picturing a white plastic bathtub. That's how it struck one reporter at the launch, and frankly it's a little unfair.

The C5 does have some touches of sports car styling, so take away the two sides of the plastic bathtub and curve the front aerodynamically inwards. Like in a bath, you sit reclined and low to the ground, your legs stretched out in front of you. It's like a streamlined, low-slung, mobility scooter, or a sleek, motorised lawnmower. Or maybe it's like riding around in a giant white slip-on shoe. Or, I don't know, it's not really like anything actually, the C5 is unique. really like anything actually, the C5 is unique. There are two wheels at the back and one at the front, and you can pedal, should you need to, but the 12 volt electric battery

claims a range of 20 miles. The controls are unorthodox. You don't have your hands out in front of you as you would on a steering wheel or the handlebars of a bike. Instead, both steering and speed are controlled by levers positioned by your thighs, where your arms will naturally come to rest as you sit.

Sinclair explains that the first vehicles have already rolled off the production lines, and you can buy them right now. He announces a multi million pound advertising campaign and plays the first television spot to the watching press. Imagine a vehicle that can drive you five miles for a penny. A vehicle that needs no petrol, just a battery, and that takes the press of a button to start the squeeze of a lever to stop.

That needs no license, no roadtacks, and you can drive whether you're 14 or 40. A vehicle that costs just £399. The Sinclair C5, it's a new power and personal transport. Everyone heads outside into the grounds of Alexandra Palace. There's snow on the lawns, but the footpaths are clear. So Clive wraps a grey scarf around his neck and poses for photos in a C5. Now the journalists are invited to have a go, and this is where things start to unravel.

Remember all those skeptics who had been won over by discovering how much fun the C5 was to drive? They had driven it around test tracks in controlled conditions. They hadn't driven it on an actual public road in real world traffic in January. Nobody had. Until now. There are obvious disadvantages. The tiny C5 is dwarfed by other traffic. It's critics predict chaos on the roads. That's the reporter from ITV News. The footage shows a C5 driver nervously hand signaling their intention to turn and traversing across a lane of traffic

as an 18-ton truck bears down on them. Then we see the reporter waiting in his C5 at stoplights behind a car, as the lights turn green and the car moves off, it belches a cloud of exhaust fumes right into the reporter's face. Nothing could compensate for the sheer feeling of vulnerability. My head was on a level with the top of a juggernaut's tires. I could not feel confident as a lorry driver so high above the ground would see me." That was the Daily Telegraphs review.

Sinclair had thought about safety, of course. He'd even made sure to get a supportive quote from the regulators at the UK's Department for Transport. As an alternative to pedal cycles, it is not thought likely to have a worse safety record. Actually, that doesn't really inspire confidence, does it? Sinclair had also produced a whole range of safety features, but because he'd wanted to keep the headline price below £400, roughly $2,000 in today's money, he'd decided to make them all optional extras. If you wanted truck drivers to see you, you could buy a high visibility mast, that's

a pole with a flag on. That would cost £7.95. How about a horn to alert the truck driver that you're right in front of them? That'll be another £7.95. Wing mirrors so you can see that there's a truck behind you? £14.95. It wasn't just safety features that Sinclair had relegated to accessories, so was protection from the weather, and launching in the middle of the British winter made weather hard to ignore. People soon discovered that if they took their C5 out on wet roads, the spray from the

wheels would leave the inside of the vehicle dirtier than the outside. You could get mud flaps for £6.95 a pair and side panels for £19.95. They are attached with Velcro. For £34.95 you could get a coat that is attached with Velcro to the side panels, like driving around with your head sticking out of a tent on wheels. More than just protection against the weather, the C5 weather cheetah is a fashionable piece of leisurewear in its own right. Its designer styling means that y'all often find that you wear it even when you're not using your C5. Or so said the optimistic Sinclair brochure. The Velcro-clad raincoat did not strike most people as a fashionable piece of leisureware, but the rain wasn't the biggest problem with a January

launch. Sinclair later explained, We hadn't realised that the batteries virtually packed up in freezing conditions. The reporter from the Daily Teleggraph soon found that out. The instructions were quite simple, sit in, switch on and go, and go the Sinclair C5 certainly did for seven minutes. Then the first battery ran flat. I pedaled the C5 back to the service point. My legs are still aching even though the slopes were gentle.

The C5's motor was attached to its rear left wheel, the brake to the wheel on the right. It turned out that when the roads were icy, either accelerating or braking was liable to send you into a spin. This must have been fun on a test track, not so much if you're in front of a juggernaut. Not so much if you're in front of a juggernaut. The idea of 14-year-old kids taking these things on the roads like today, no license, no insurance, no training, no seatbelt, it practically horrifies me. Tweaking the C5 design to meet the electrically assisted pedal cycle regulations had seemed like a masterstroke, but it had distracted Sinclair from his original vision of progress towards a fully functioning

electric car, and now it looked like a public relations disaster. Despite the terrible early reviews, Sir Clive still had some customers. In February, the month after the launch, the London Times went out to meet some early adopters, such as this retiree. I was very excited when it first arrived, but the first time I tried it out, it just would not go up a hill, and I had to come home." Sinclair tried desperately to reboot public interest. He hired unemployed teenagers to drive C5s around major British cities, but the more that people bought C5s, the more complaints piled up. Sinclair had claimed that battery would last for 20 miles. For many, it was more like 10. To meet the regulations, the C5 was limited to 15 miles per hour.

In practice, people said they topped out at 12.5. Worse still, by the time you factored in the need to replace the battery, it arguably wasn't much cheaper to run than a mo-ped powered by gasoline. The UK's consumer association took their time to gather the evidence, and in summer, they delivered a succinct and damning verdict. How far? A lot less than claimed. How fast?

Hard to keep up with traffic, handling and breaking? Adiquate? How safe? Not very good. how maneuverable, disappointing, how secure, too easy to steal, how reliable, not promising, are verdict of limited use in its present form poor value for money. By August, retailers were desperate to offload their C5 stock. They cut the price by more than half, and with all the accessories thrown in too.

In September, Sinclair stopped production. And on the 11th of October, just nine months after the launch, Sir Clive publicly announced that Sinclair vehicle vehicles limited was closing down. It originally planned to manufacture 8,000 C5s every week. It sold 14,000 in total, not even a fortnight's worth. Why was the C5 such a disaster? The answer isn't quite what you might think, but more on that in a moment.

Why did the C1C5 fail? That might seem like a silly question. Haven't we heard more than enough reasons already? But it's not a silly question, because look around you. Electric cars are fast becoming the norm just as Singler envisaged their word. Electric bikes are popular with commuters. And if you live in a major city,

it's probably got shared electric scooters that you pick up, unlock with an app, ride to your destination and leave there. So Clive Sinclair invented the C5 because he thought short urban journeys needed small electric vehicles. Now we have them. It was a good idea then and now." He said in 2010, �I should have handled it differently. It could have succeeded. I rushed at it too much.�

A few years after the C5 debacle, the European Journal of Marketing published an article looking for the lessons. The C5 was a classic example of what marketers call a technology push innovation, where you invent something and hope that people will want it. The opposite is a demand pull innovation, where you figure out what people want and try to invent it. There's nothing wrong with technology push innovations. They can succeed brilliantly. Nobody knew they wanted a pocket-sized calculator until Sinclair

came up with them. In 1980, computers were seen as tools for business. Would people really want cheaper, portable computers as toys in the home. Well, yes, with hindsight, but at the time, it was a gamble. But usually with a technology push innovation, you'll want a bit of consumer feedback before you go all in, for example through market research. Sir Clive didn't believe in any of that. He thought people didn't know what they wanted yet, and he was happy to bet on his own instincts about that. When he did a focus group for the C5, it was only to check if people thought the controls were in the right position. He wasn't much interested in what they thought of the product itself. If he had been, Sinclair might have discovered

the problems that became apparent only on the launch day. And if it had been sent back to the drawing board, perhaps it had launched a different product first. He might have gone straight to his two-seater city car. You see those on the streets now. Perhaps he could have revived the scooter he had played around within his office a decade before. Or maybe he could have pitched

the C5 to a different market. Might it have taken hold as a toy for rich people, or in vacation resorts or golf courses, perhaps it might. But often, there's a deeper reason why good ideas fail, and to find out what it is, let's rewind to a year before the launch of the Sinclair C5. In 1984, Sir Clive is giving a speech to the US Congressional Clearing House on the future. I anticipate totally automatic personal vehicles still with all the freedom in space and time of today's cars, but guided by machine intelligence. They will be powered by electricity drawn from internal batteries and towns and on minor roads and from a main supply on the highways, possibly inductively coupled into the vehicle. These latter-day cars will be well-nice, silent and clean, but, above all, free from human

fallibility. These are ideas that are only just now approaching feasibility in the hands of companies such as Tesla, but Sinclair, remember, is talking in 1984. In his book, Where Good Ideas Come From, the author Stephen Johnson talks about the notion of the adjacent possible. It's a phrase coined by a biologist, Stuart Kaufman, to describe how evolution works. Nature can't take big leaps. It can get from primordial soup to human beings,

but not all in one go. Evolution can happen only in small incremental steps. Johnson makes the case that this phrase applies just as well to human innovations. He gives the metaphor of an ever-expanding house. You open a door to a new room and it reveals three more doors to rules you didn't know existed. This metaphor for the adjacent possible helps to explain why many inventions, like the steam engine or the telegraph, have occurred to different people independently at around the same time.

They all spotted the same new door. The adjacent possible expands with every new technology or new way of thinking, but it also limits us. We can open doors only from the rooms we've discovered. Now and then, says Johnson, an idea occurs to someone that teleports us forward a few rooms. Those ideas almost always end up failing in the short term, precisely because they have skipped ahead. And isn't that the perfect description of Sinclair's problem?

He could see into rooms that were far beyond the current house. But then he could only guess at which doors we needed to open to find them. The C5 was too far beyond the adjacent possible. New rooms have opened up since then. Batcher is a smaller, lighter and more powerful. We've started to worry not just about the price of oil, but also the cost of the planet of carbon emissions. That worry opened doors to electric cars. As for the electric bikes and the scooters, they've been helped by more cities building cycle paths. In 1985 most streets were starkly divided, one part

for going at 30 miles an hour on wheels and another for going at 3 miles an hour on foot. Doing 12 miles an hour on battery powered wheels, you don't really belong in either. You bit with a smart phone opened up another new room, as did the concept of the sharing economy. No wonder then, that many companies spotted the door to the scooter and bike sharing business model at much the same time, when conditions are right. Ideas pop up everywhere. Maybe I'm being too kind to Clive Sinclair.

Maybe his C5 was just a ridiculous idea. Maybe his eerily accurate vision of the future was just a lucky guess. Maybe. But remember what else Sinclair was inventing? Computers. This is what he told an interviewer in the mid 1980s, years before the World Wide Web. I think that what I'm doing is making a machine that will, in due course, sit in the home and replace or supplement the doctor, the solicitor, the teacher.

The machine will be there and it will advise people. They can ask it questions and it'll give them answers, perhaps, even tell them what to do. They can say, what's on television tonight? And they won't have to worry about how it will get the information, it'll decide that, it'll bring up somebody or look it up in its memory banks or find it out by whatever means. Or they can say to it, what's the first train to London around about midday tomorrow? Or I'd got a pain in my right side and really haven't been feeling too well, and it'll recognise them, it'll know who they are and when they're talking to it.

Siri and Alexa and Google can do some of this already, and the rest is coming. Sir Clive had yet again, shown us a vision of a far-off room, but with only a murky sense of what sequence of doors might lead us there. Google doesn't ring somebody up. We needed to find the door to the worldwide web first. Sinclair's interviewer seems puzzled. What is it that you find so terribly exciting about this idea?

I suppose it's because it'll be the first time that humans won't be the only known intelligence in the known universe. We don't have to wait for them to arrive from outer space. We can build them here. Why do you want that to happen? I don't particularly. I think it's exciting though. In his old age, Sinclair no longer found computers exciting. He didn't use one, he didn't even use a calculator. After the C5 debacle, Sinclair cut a diminished figure. He hadn't quite lost all his money as it feared, but it lost plenty. Worse, he'd become a joke. He sold off the computer side

of his business. His marriage broke down. He took up poker. He hung out in nightclubs. He married a pole dancer 34 years his junior. He made more attempts to invent forms of personal transport but none ever got very far. Sir Clive Sinclair died in 2021. On Twitter, people posted their remembrances. One of them replied to an obituary that pictured Sinclair with a ZX Spectrum. RIP, he tweeted, to 65 million followers. I loved that computer. The author of that tweet?

Elon Musk. When Clive Sinclair launched the ZX Spectrum, Elon Musk was a 10-year-old boy in South Africa. Just like Sinclair as a boy, Musk loved playing around with gadgets. Like Sinclair, Musk grew up to make his fortune as a technology pioneer with one great idea after another. And like Sinclair, Musk made a bullsey gamble on electric vehicles. Tesla is now one of the world's most valuable companies, Elon Musk, one of its richest people. Elon Musk and Clive Sinclair were both brilliant and visionary.

Elon Musk had the adjacent possible on his side. Poor Clive Sinclair did not, but that made all the difference. A great book about Clive Sinclair is The Sinclair Story by Rodney Dale. For a full list of sources, check out the show notes at timhalford.com. Corsinary Tales is written by me, Tim Halford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilly, with support from Courtney Garino and Emily Vaughn. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Weiss, Julia Barton edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Guthriege, Stella Halford and Ruthis Wright.

The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mia LeB Bell, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fein, John Schnarrs, Carly Mieleori, Eric Sandler, Royston Becerve, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Marano, Daniela LeCarn, and Maya Canig. Corsinary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review. And if you want to hear the show add free and listen to four exclusive cautionary tail shorts, then sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin.fm-plus. us. you