Sinclair C5 of Liverpool, which planned to sell 1,000 of them to an Egyptian businessman for use on a university campus while another 1,500 were intended to be sold in the UK. Many reasons have been suggested for the failure of Sinclair Vehicles and what Dale calls "the jigsaw of the C5's disappointment". One of the receivers of Sinclair Vehicles, John Sapte, suggested that Sinclair had taken the wrong tack with its marketing of the C5: "It was presented as a serious transport, when perhaps it should have been presented as a luxury product, an up-market plaything." Ellar's director Maurice Levensohn took
Sinclair C5 dry in the vehicle's open cockpit. Other accessories included seat cushions and spare batteries. Sir Clive Sinclair's interest in the possibilities of electric vehicles originated in the late 1950s during a holiday job for the electronics company Solatron. Fifteen years later, in the early 1970s, he was the head of his own successful electronics company, Sinclair Radionics, based in St Ives in Cambridgeshire. He tasked one of his employees, Chris Curry – later a co-founder of Acorn Computers – to carry out some preliminary research into electric vehicle design. Sinclair took the view that an electric vehicle needed to be