C5 cautionary tale

[uglifruit]

Tim Harford (Financial times, Undercover economist, Radio 4 More Or Less) did a nice half an hour Podcast about the C5 as part of the "cautionary tales" series.

Here.

[Nitrowing]

The single, biggest, mistake with the C5 was having it's launch in the middle of Winter
I had one a few years ago and it was a great machine to tinker with and pop in to town on. Yes, it had issues like the brakes being completely inadequate but, I wish I had been able to keep it.
I would definitely have another except it would probably be cheaper to make one than buy an old one.

[Crafty88]

I found the tyres did not offer much traction in snow as kept getting wheel snip.
A friend of my father had the loan of one once so we were invited up to have a try.

[Wall_Axe]

What if it had a similar form factor to a bike?

I think the main complaint being that a truck driver wouldn't see you in a C5, so a good chance of you being smeared into the tarmac.

You'd not be able to use them on the pavement either. So the type of neighbourhood where you could pop down the shops would be rare?

[patters]

I ride an e-bike in London now, since I need to transport two kids and it's about twice as fast as a car for most journeys as congestion has got so bad. I got rid of the car.

I was just thinking the other morning that this was effectively Clive's vision. How it could have all been so different... But most others drive ever-bigger child crushing SUVs.

[Nitrowing]

I think the main complaint being that a truck driver wouldn't see you in a C5, so a good chance of you being smeared into the tarmac.

You'd not be able to use them on the pavement either. So the type of neighbourhood where you could pop down the shops would be rare?

It's all 20 and 30mph around here so nothing scary. I think you've more chance of "mum in SUV" squishing you than a truck as one appears constantly distracted and the other is a professional driver

[R-Tape]

the "cautionary tales" series.

I've been listening to this excellent series on BBC Sounds and this one isn't there, so ta for the heads-up. I'm nitpicking, but I wish they used a recognisable ZX-Spectum beep instead of the generic computer bleep (at least I think that's what it is). To be fair, non-specchums might not recognise farty beeps as computer noises!

The series, good as it is, often reframes the simple as something more complicated - talking of 'adjacent possibilities' and the like. I do think that's true, and Clive was way ahead of his time, but we can't ignore the fact about how badly it was done.

IMO summed up as: if you've got a good idea, don't rush it and cock it up, and if you do, if the idea is good enough, you've at least helped its progress.

I think I'm harsh on this because of that bloody A-Bike I bought, which was probably only tested in the road track of a padded cell...

[Jbizzel]

I ride an e-bike in London now, since I need to transport two kids and it's about twice as fast as a car for most journeys as congestion has got so bad. I got rid of the car.

I was just thinking the other morning that this was effectively Clive's vision. How it could have all been so different... But most others drive ever-bigger child crushing SUVs.

He designed the C5 around new legislation at the time. The legislation hasn't changed since, so the type of vehicle possible then is similar to now.

It was a good product that could have found a market. Even now they look cool and look like a lot of fun!

[TMD2003]

Sparked by this post, I fished out the episode of "Toast" that @R-Tape posted last May, and listened to that on the way to the skating rink for a Sunday afternoon weaving around small kids with zimmer frames and hopeless parents trying to supervise. It's a 21-mile drive along the back roads of the flattest part of the country, and the programme was so short it was finished before I'd arrived.

Despite the mention of the journalists taking the C5 onto the slopes outside Alexandra Palace in January, with the cold wrecking the range of the lead-acid batteries, the C5 in its launch spec would be no more suitable to get me to the rink now than it was then. The battery wouldn't have the range to cover the distance one way, let alone both, and even if it did (such as, if it was replaced with a modern LiFePO4 equivalent), with a top speed of 15 mph, the journey would take over an hour each way. The surfaces of the majority of Fenland roads are smashed to pieces, with potholes that would swallow up a C5's wheels in their entirety, and the cycle lanes that the C5 really belongs in don't exist outside of Cambridge. What little luggage compartment there is wouldn't accommodate my skates and a backpack full of chunky body armour. Plus, it was chucking down with rain and that'd be a thoroughly miserable experience even if all the previous problems were solved.

Obviously we can no longer ask Sir Clive and he was probably fed up of answering questions about the C5 by 1986, but I wonder if he was just too trapped in his "eccentric inventor" bubble. It won't have helped that Sinclair Research was all about Cambridge, The Whole Cambridge and Nothing But The Cambridge with its long-standing cycling culture, to the point where he might just not have realised that the roads immediately outside the city centre were spectacularly unsuitable for the C5 (and, as I've said, still are nearly 40 years later; they may even be worse). I'd even cite parts of Cambridge that the C5 would have difficulty handling - Mitcham's Corner, the hill between Magdalene College and Victoria Road (and I used to live there, so I know it very well), the two huge roundabouts on Elizabeth Way... and there will be others. Then, and there's really no excuse for not knowing this one, Cambridge's level of bike theft is absolutely rampant, just because there are so many of them, and enough rogue traders willing to sell them on and ask no questions where they came from; the C5 is harder to steal than a bike, but still presents little deterrent to even a mildly determined thief. And then... the Toast episode mentioned that Sir Clive just couldn't and wouldn't stop describing the C5 as "an electric car" before its launch; this is going to sound harsh, but how can he have been so out of touch with the common people (who he'd just sold thousands of ZX80s, ZX81s and Spectrums to) to not realise that, to them, "an electric car" conjured up images of a battery-powered Austin Maestro, rather than a tiny trike that's the size of a child's go-kart? This is going to sound even worse, but... Lord Yes Sir Alan "You're Fired!" Sugar would never have made that mistake - although the mere thought of an Amstrad electric car, even now, fills me with the kind of cold dread that even the Wheego Life (a low-budget horror that sold for $30k, based on shoddy Chinese technology and built by left-wing American hipsters with more dreams than business sense) couldn't manage. Incidentally, the "original" Wheego Whip, in the same bodyshell but with even more primitive EV technology, was limited to 25 mph and was pretty much confined to the kind of suburban-retirement-community roads that might have been the C5's ultimate fate if that American investor had bought the rights to build it.

I'm going to have to give this one a listen now, for comparison purposes. It's longer than the BBC programme, so should be a bit more probing.

[TMD2003]

I finally listened to the Tim Harford podcast yesterday and it covered a lot more ground than Toast did.

Now, does anyone want to complete the trilogy? Released barely four hours ago, Ruaridh MacVeigh has turned his "Motion History" series to the C5. He's a "plains, trains and automobiles" kind of storyteller - and don't be too put off if you think he sounds like's reading out an article designed for print, because... he does. Also, try to ignore the bit where he says Sir Clive bought a factory to built the C5, because that was a glaring error. Anyway, it's a mere 10 minutes of your time.