Big boy's toy, or potential winner?
Posted: Sat Dec 24, 2022 2:15 pm
https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... g-spenders is interesting. Well worth reading it all, but I liked
Building cars is hard, so when Ben Hedley started his business he started small. To be precise, he started at 75% of the size. The Little Car Company does what its name suggests, producing shrunken but drivable battery electric toy versions of full-size classics from the likes of Aston Martin and Ferrari.
The company has made its way to £10m in turnover and 60 employees almost by accident over four years, Hedley says, walking around the company’s workshop in Bicester Heritage, a converted Royal Air Force base in Oxfordshire that has been turned into a hub for classic car businesses. The company made its first profits in the last financial quarter, despite supply chain problems that have hit automotive manufacturers big and small.
The replicas start at €36,000 (£30,800), meaning they can only be playthings for the rich. But Hedley is not content with building small, expensive electric versions of big cars. The company is launching an ambitious, even quixotic, effort to do the opposite: build a full-scale, road-legal version of a remote-controlled toy car that was popular when Hedley was a child. By next summer he hopes to launch a stripped-back, electric off-road buggy for £15,000.
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...A £15,000 price tag, if achieved, would put it within the range of kit car buyers. The Little Car Co is never going to be a mass market carmaker, but if it does manage to run the gauntlet of making the Wild One Max legal on non-motorway roads then the idea of people using them for urban transport does not seem inconceivable either (although probably in warmer climes, considering it will be fairly open to the elements). Cheap, small, electric runarounds like the electric G-Wiz or the Citroën’s newer cuboid Ami will be increasingly attractive as prices drop.
“This could be an alternative in the summer rather than jumping in a diesel SUV,” Hedley says of his prototype. “It’s brilliant fun. It’s just a completely different experience.”
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Making the Wild One Max has been a lesson in just how many excrescences modern cars are built with, he says. Air conditioning, giant touch screens and electric seat adjusters add weight, and therefore extra carbon emissions and cost.