Sinclair C5

Elk2Mig says, I suspect we're all going to say PCBWay for the sponsor.

I want a Sinclair C5 racing game with Neil and Lee as the drivers.

Neil, as he seemed reasonably competent shooting around the streets in his, and Lee because he couldn't even get out of the car park at the Retro Collective without crashing.

Let's see, Prefim had a very specific request here.

It's a pushbike, but it is the Sinclair.

Yeah, it's like a Sinclair C5 vibes recumbent bike with, bike with some kinda fun bits on it.

Turns out that I think that's an actual real bike.

I think it's called the Avatar 2000.

Mm-hmm.

yeah I still hit the watch hours luckily for that I get good watch hours on my channel yeah it's just I've chopped and changed my content so much over the time yeah sometimes I'll post things about my Sinclair C5 which is a vehicle from the 80s next thing you know I'm traveling then it's making money and YouTube's trying to make a line for people's channels they want to see one type of content yeah I don't do that I don't want to do one type of content I've always filmed my life and what I do and that's what I want to continue doing

Yeah, so that's the main reason why the income is declining because the views numbers are declining?

Yeah, so they don't know who to push my content to, which is a struggle.

me and Ken Bruce yeah I used to have a bus licence it's expired so that's a job opportunity going

there's a Sinclair C5 and it's up the stairs you wanted to go to that one didn't

you I think I might go and have a look I drove one you know when they were introduced really in the early 80s yes frightening experience.

I'll go and take a look at that.

Well, we're talking about electric cars, but this was one of the first, effectively.

I'm told it was actually based on washing machine parts, but I'm not sure whether that's true.

But it was developed by Sir Clive Sinclair, and it's the Sinclair C5.

Now, Sinclair was probably best known for the Spectrum computer, which was built in Dundee at the old Timex factory.

Now we slide into bucket three.

The Sinclair C5, 1985.

Sir Clive Sinclair, the man who gave Britain the ZX Spectrum home computer, decides he's going to reinvent personal transport.

What he comes up with is an electric tricycle you sit in, like a recumbent go-kart with a plastic shell.

So let's consider hypothesis two, which is that General Magic was always doomed because it was just too far ahead of its time.

In our Cautionary Tales episode, The False Dawn of the Electric Car, we met the Sinclair C5, an attempt to imagine a sustainable electric vehicle that flopped so badly it became a national joke in the UK in the mid-1980s.

That was partly because Clive Sinclair made some bad choices in the way he designed and marketed his invention.

But it was also because electric cars need affordable, high-capacity batteries, and they just didn't exist at the time.

I was going to

say, because that guy, we started talking to him about the Sinclair C5 trike thing.

Oh yeah, they had a Sinclair C5.

That's another thing I kept saying to Hazel.

I was like, you've got a Sinclair C5 there.

They've got one of those.

You're going to love that.

They'll say it's not a guitar, it's a guitar shaped object or whatever.