As a child in the 80s I was exceedingly nerdy. My loving and generous parents did nothing to discourage that. Indeed they encouraged my nascent interest in computers by regularly updating my ZX computers (80->81->Spectrum->48K etc.) and then Acorn computers. All gratefully received.
But then I was offered a C5 as a potential Christmas gift. "It's a Sinclair, you like those" was the approximate reasoning. But even I had to draw the line. There's only so much bullying one person can take. I was used to being laughed at for my fashion choices, my social awkwardness and my lack of sporting prowess. But a C5 would have been the final nail in the coffin.
Ungrateful? Certainly. But I think I made the right choice.
> As a child in the 80s I was exceedingly nerdy. My loving and generous parents did nothing to discourage that. Indeed they encouraged my nascent interest in computers by regularly updating my ZX computers (80->81->Spectrum->48K etc.) and then Acorn computers. All gratefully received.
Yeah, I reminisced a bit in the thread about his death 5 years ago.
I did also get to play around in a C5 that they had at a secondary school that my father was teaching at (either Bassingbourn Village College or Collenswood School in Stevenage), must have been some time in the late 80s.
> There's only so much bullying one person can take. I was used to being laughed at for my fashion choices, my social awkwardness and my lack of sporting prowess.
Looking at the photos and trying to understand how a person would comfortably drive it, I figured I must be missing something.
So I looked up photos with a person inside and no, it really is that bad [0]. Pure form over function.
Uncomfortable, yes. That's bad enough. But you hands are far back under your center of gravity. Any crash over a few km/hr is going to result in a faceplant because there's no way you'll bring your hands forward fast enough. Top speed of 24km/hr is enough to cause serious... death by head trauma.
Recumbent bikes/trikes and C5s have a common (very serious in my view) safety flaw which is they have a very low visual profile at the eye level of most drivers, which makes them (I think) really hazardous in dense city traffic. The first thing your average West London driver taking their kids to/from school, ballet classes, drama club etc would see of a recumbent bike of any kind is when they had already gone under the wheels of their gigantic Chelsea tractor.
There's a subtle difference. The vehicles in your picture have moved the controls closer to the operator's hips; a little bit rearward, upward, and outward. This is probably a much more comfortable experience, especially for people whose arms are short relative to their torso length.
The wrist position is also rotated 90 degrees which looks a lot more comfortable with arms at sides IMHO.
Just because they're niche popular doesn't mean they're a good idea. That said the position of the people on those trikes doesn't look nearly as bad as the C5.
I have occasionally seen continental European tourists on those in Ireland. They struck me as a really bad idea for another reason. They're very low to the ground, which is probably good for aerodynamics but terrible for visibility for people in trucks, busses etc. There's no way I would cycle one on any normal road.
Some people do have a small flag sticking up but I don't think that's enough.
The proliferation and arms race of increasingly huge vehicles with poor visibility hasn't taken hold in Europe yet, but I'm not so sure that will be the case in 5 or 10 years.
We have our fair share of Range Rovers and other SUV shaped things but the bonnet heights are still not that far above average adult waist height.
Vehicles like Ford/RAM/GMC trucks with hood heights at or above eye level of an average adult just aren't a common sight at all.
Buses and trucks often have better visibility than those as they have a shorter distance between driver and the front of the vehicle. There are still huge blind spots though.
Most European countries have a much greater affinity and acceptance of cyclists than my experience of the US.
Cycling has its risks but it's far less dangerous than being sedentary. The UK has around 24 cyclist deaths per year per billion miles traveled. The US figure is about 4 times as high as the UK per distance traveled.
In the UK it's more dangerous to be a pedestrian (27 pedestrian deaths per year per billion miles traveled) yet people fixate on cycling being inherently dangerous whilst pedestrian deaths are just kind of an accepted consequence of cars driving right next to where pedestrians walk.
I always thought that a lot of the riders on these had back issues or something else that would make a long ride on a normal bicycle painful or hard to do.
However, 3 wheelers quickly reach their limitations in turns, since you can't lean to balance. So making a C5 go much faster than its original top speed could be risky.
Could the car lean if it had electric suspension? Is this a fundamental limitation of a 3 wheeler with 2 in the back or is it just difficult to achieve?
“On BBC's Top Gear programme in 2002, Jeremy Clarkson said, "I have to say, absolute hand on heart, I've never had so much fun in a car, really and truthfully, and I don't think I'd ever tire of it."”
Execution could have been a bit better but ultimately it's really hard to make electric vehicles with 1980s battery technology. Just about the only successful EV of the era was the golf cart and that's very niche.
Electric moped was right idea but some 30 years ahead of its time.
There was one much more successful EV, although it too was niche: The UK had "perhaps 40,000 milk floats" in the 1970s and 1980s before supermarkets took over as primary milk distributors. ( https://zavanak.com/transport-topics/british-electric-cv-his... )
The Sinclair C5 battery charger and battery was ahead of its time. I remember my Dad (who was something of a lead acid battery nerd) being very excited about it.
The battery in the C5 was designed to be run to 0% charge which would kill most lead acid batteries in no time, but if I remember rightly the charger would recover them by putting quite high voltages across them to de-sulphate them. Or something like that (not a lead acid battery nerd :-).
Probably also the wrong country. I can imagine something like C5 taking off in the SF Bay Area. In the UK, you have something like 160 rainy days a year. People bike over there, but this somehow feels worse.
>The driver sits in a recumbent position in an open cockpit, steering via a handlebar that is located under the knees. A power switch and front and rear brake levers are positioned on the handlebar. As a supplement to or replacement for electric power, the C5 can also be propelled via bicycle-style pedals located at the front of the cockpit. The maximum speed of an unmodified C5 is 15 miles per hour (24 km/h). At the rear of the vehicle is a small luggage compartment with a capacity of 28 litres (1 cu ft).[5] As the C5 does not have a reverse gear, reversing direction is done by getting out, picking up the front end and turning it around by hand.
Presumably this is sarcasm but the C5 as described seems basically to be an electric recumbent cargo bike. That is, a vehicle that is fairly common today in big northern European cities, used for deliveries and sometimes even family transport.
The C5 seems like a pretty good deal: £399 (equivalent to £1247 today according to the BoE inflation calculator) for an electric trike with storage made in the UK. In contrast, finding a made in china cargo bike for that price seems impossible.
> The maximum legal speed of the vehicle would be limited to only 15 miles per hour (24 km/h); it could not weigh any more than 60 kilograms (130 lb), including the battery; and its motor could not be rated at any more than 250 watts.
It's interesting that these are still essentially the regulations for e-bikes in the EU today, I guess slightly relaxed (25km/h, 250W average only but can peak higher).
It's not far off the speed and range of my ebike which works well as transport in London. I wouldn't want to be that low down visibility wise though. On the ebike my head is a little higher than if I were standing which works quite well.
If I recall correctly they did did one niche application. Some people used them to trundle up and down the decks of oil tankers (a bicycle would seem better to me).
Given that there are no hills to climb on an oil tanker, and the distances involved are a few hundred meters at a time (at most), a bicycle seems so much better, cheaper, simpler, doesn't need charging, easier to fix.
As a child in the 80s I was exceedingly nerdy. My loving and generous parents did nothing to discourage that. Indeed they encouraged my nascent interest in computers by regularly updating my ZX computers (80->81->Spectrum->48K etc.) and then Acorn computers. All gratefully received.
But then I was offered a C5 as a potential Christmas gift. "It's a Sinclair, you like those" was the approximate reasoning. But even I had to draw the line. There's only so much bullying one person can take. I was used to being laughed at for my fashion choices, my social awkwardness and my lack of sporting prowess. But a C5 would have been the final nail in the coffin.
Ungrateful? Certainly. But I think I made the right choice.
> As a child in the 80s I was exceedingly nerdy. My loving and generous parents did nothing to discourage that. Indeed they encouraged my nascent interest in computers by regularly updating my ZX computers (80->81->Spectrum->48K etc.) and then Acorn computers. All gratefully received.
Yeah, I reminisced a bit in the thread about his death 5 years ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28564456
I did also get to play around in a C5 that they had at a secondary school that my father was teaching at (either Bassingbourn Village College or Collenswood School in Stevenage), must have been some time in the late 80s.
> There's only so much bullying one person can take. I was used to being laughed at for my fashion choices, my social awkwardness and my lack of sporting prowess.
School in the UK in the late 80s was brutal.
Looking at the photos and trying to understand how a person would comfortably drive it, I figured I must be missing something.
So I looked up photos with a person inside and no, it really is that bad [0]. Pure form over function.
Uncomfortable, yes. That's bad enough. But you hands are far back under your center of gravity. Any crash over a few km/hr is going to result in a faceplant because there's no way you'll bring your hands forward fast enough. Top speed of 24km/hr is enough to cause serious... death by head trauma.
[0] https://www.autocar.co.uk/sites/autocar.co.uk/files/styles/g...
It's a recumbent trike, this sort of design seems to still exist today, so presumably it works somehow.
https://www.rad-innovations.com/blog-our-news/about-recumben...
Recumbent bikes/trikes and C5s have a common (very serious in my view) safety flaw which is they have a very low visual profile at the eye level of most drivers, which makes them (I think) really hazardous in dense city traffic. The first thing your average West London driver taking their kids to/from school, ballet classes, drama club etc would see of a recumbent bike of any kind is when they had already gone under the wheels of their gigantic Chelsea tractor.
There's a subtle difference. The vehicles in your picture have moved the controls closer to the operator's hips; a little bit rearward, upward, and outward. This is probably a much more comfortable experience, especially for people whose arms are short relative to their torso length.
The wrist position is also rotated 90 degrees which looks a lot more comfortable with arms at sides IMHO.
Just because they're niche popular doesn't mean they're a good idea. That said the position of the people on those trikes doesn't look nearly as bad as the C5.
I have occasionally seen continental European tourists on those in Ireland. They struck me as a really bad idea for another reason. They're very low to the ground, which is probably good for aerodynamics but terrible for visibility for people in trucks, busses etc. There's no way I would cycle one on any normal road.
Some people do have a small flag sticking up but I don't think that's enough.
The proliferation and arms race of increasingly huge vehicles with poor visibility hasn't taken hold in Europe yet, but I'm not so sure that will be the case in 5 or 10 years.
We have our fair share of Range Rovers and other SUV shaped things but the bonnet heights are still not that far above average adult waist height.
Vehicles like Ford/RAM/GMC trucks with hood heights at or above eye level of an average adult just aren't a common sight at all.
Buses and trucks often have better visibility than those as they have a shorter distance between driver and the front of the vehicle. There are still huge blind spots though.
Most European countries have a much greater affinity and acceptance of cyclists than my experience of the US.
Cycling has its risks but it's far less dangerous than being sedentary. The UK has around 24 cyclist deaths per year per billion miles traveled. The US figure is about 4 times as high as the UK per distance traveled.
In the UK it's more dangerous to be a pedestrian (27 pedestrian deaths per year per billion miles traveled) yet people fixate on cycling being inherently dangerous whilst pedestrian deaths are just kind of an accepted consequence of cars driving right next to where pedestrians walk.
I always thought that a lot of the riders on these had back issues or something else that would make a long ride on a normal bicycle painful or hard to do.
Just like with bicycles, they can be made much more visible. I've seen recumbents that are much more visible than your average bicycle.
Bad infrastructure doesn't make the bikes bad. People ride these just fine in the Netherlands, even if they're not that common.
Quite common to spot them in Germany or Netherlands.
C5, named after the vertebra most likely to snap in a low speed collision with a moderate caused pothole.
> how a person would comfortably drive it
Just like a kayak, but without the rowing.
The C5 really was a marvel of design for 1985. Sinclair really went all in on it.
- Polypropylene injection-molded bodywork (largest of its kind in 1985)
- Lotus-designed suspension and handling geometry
- Electric motor based on a modified torpedo cooling fan design
- Handlebar-mounted electronics with LED range and load indicators
- Custom deep-cycle lead-acid battery technology with 'smart' charging
- Toothed-belt drive system for quiet operation
It really was like seeing a bit of design from the future. Commercially a failure, alas.
It's a collectible but the remaining ones can likely be improved very much with modern eBike parts, lighter and more powerful motor and batteries...
However, 3 wheelers quickly reach their limitations in turns, since you can't lean to balance. So making a C5 go much faster than its original top speed could be risky.
Could the car lean if it had electric suspension? Is this a fundamental limitation of a 3 wheeler with 2 in the back or is it just difficult to achieve?
It certainly could. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carver_(automotive_company). Got raving reviews from testers
“On BBC's Top Gear programme in 2002, Jeremy Clarkson said, "I have to say, absolute hand on heart, I've never had so much fun in a car, really and truthfully, and I don't think I'd ever tire of it."”
There’s an electric two-seater now. Around €12k
Last year they celebrated the 40th anniversary with a group ride through Cambridge city centre:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98jr0145rgo
Time to watch Micro Men (2009) one more time.
Execution could have been a bit better but ultimately it's really hard to make electric vehicles with 1980s battery technology. Just about the only successful EV of the era was the golf cart and that's very niche.
Electric moped was right idea but some 30 years ahead of its time.
There was one much more successful EV, although it too was niche: The UK had "perhaps 40,000 milk floats" in the 1970s and 1980s before supermarkets took over as primary milk distributors. ( https://zavanak.com/transport-topics/british-electric-cv-his... )
When I was a kid in Edinburgh no milk was delivered by ICE vehicle. It was either electric or horse. Also Sean Connery's first job..
> Just about the only successful EV of the era was the golf cart and that's very niche.
Electric milk floats (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_float) were common even in the 1960s, and, I think, decades earlier.
Electric forklifts have been common since a long time, too. Not having an exhaust is a big advantage when operating one indoors.
(Both also fairly nice, but milk floats where used on public roads and fork lifts require much more power than golf carts)
The Sinclair C5 battery charger and battery was ahead of its time. I remember my Dad (who was something of a lead acid battery nerd) being very excited about it.
The battery in the C5 was designed to be run to 0% charge which would kill most lead acid batteries in no time, but if I remember rightly the charger would recover them by putting quite high voltages across them to de-sulphate them. Or something like that (not a lead acid battery nerd :-).
Probably also the wrong country. I can imagine something like C5 taking off in the SF Bay Area. In the UK, you have something like 160 rainy days a year. People bike over there, but this somehow feels worse.
This is the same guy that created the ZX81 (that I learned to code on) and the ZX Spectrum. He changed my life.
He hired the people who created those things.
What a strange response.
>The driver sits in a recumbent position in an open cockpit, steering via a handlebar that is located under the knees. A power switch and front and rear brake levers are positioned on the handlebar. As a supplement to or replacement for electric power, the C5 can also be propelled via bicycle-style pedals located at the front of the cockpit. The maximum speed of an unmodified C5 is 15 miles per hour (24 km/h). At the rear of the vehicle is a small luggage compartment with a capacity of 28 litres (1 cu ft).[5] As the C5 does not have a reverse gear, reversing direction is done by getting out, picking up the front end and turning it around by hand.
Well, hard to believe this was a flop.
It was the 1980s. People wanted to see products that looked like Star Wars props.
https://www.carrozzieri-italiani.com/listing/italdesign-mach...
Presumably this is sarcasm but the C5 as described seems basically to be an electric recumbent cargo bike. That is, a vehicle that is fairly common today in big northern European cities, used for deliveries and sometimes even family transport.
The C5 seems like a pretty good deal: £399 (equivalent to £1247 today according to the BoE inflation calculator) for an electric trike with storage made in the UK. In contrast, finding a made in china cargo bike for that price seems impossible.
> The maximum legal speed of the vehicle would be limited to only 15 miles per hour (24 km/h); it could not weigh any more than 60 kilograms (130 lb), including the battery; and its motor could not be rated at any more than 250 watts.
It's interesting that these are still essentially the regulations for e-bikes in the EU today, I guess slightly relaxed (25km/h, 250W average only but can peak higher).
Spitting Image nailed the mentioned criticisms back in the day: https://youtu.be/YLRTDy3Pvhw?si=UpBb9VBvSTcCjEEF
If you're in Denver, Colorado you can see one in-person at The Forney Museum of Transportation.
It's not far off the speed and range of my ebike which works well as transport in London. I wouldn't want to be that low down visibility wise though. On the ebike my head is a little higher than if I were standing which works quite well.
If I recall correctly they did did one niche application. Some people used them to trundle up and down the decks of oil tankers (a bicycle would seem better to me).
Given that there are no hills to climb on an oil tanker, and the distances involved are a few hundred meters at a time (at most), a bicycle seems so much better, cheaper, simpler, doesn't need charging, easier to fix.
Way ahead of its time. Some kind of rain cover and maybe flip the wheel combination around and it would make a sweet ev for the bike lanes.
Sir Clive's Dymaxion Car. Doomed to similar failure. I love it for that reason alone.
Yes! the weird Buckminster designed vehicle which had the driver so far ahead if the front axle it was unnerving to drive
Wasn't it possible to store these by standing them on end?
see also this (it also mentions the C5 but focuses on pedal-driven velomobiles) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velomobile