Sinclair C5 to guide development. Gus Desbarats, the C5's industrial designer, attributes the vehicle's flawed concept to Sinclair operating in a "bubble" and believes that Sinclair "failed to understand the difference between a new market, computing, and a mature one, transport, where there were more benchmarks to compare against". He comments that the experience of working on the C5 convinced him of the need for industrial designers such as himself to get "involved early in the innovation process, shaping basic configurations, never again [being] satisfied to simply decorate a fundamentally bad idea". Sinclair himself said in 2005 that the C5 "was early
Sinclair C5 However, it imposed a number of restrictions that limited the performance of any vehicle that would qualify under the new standards. The maximum legal speed of the vehicle would be limited to only ; it could not weigh any more than , including the battery; and its motor could not be rated at any more than 250 watts. Despite these limitations, the vehicle was seen as only the first step in a series of increasingly ambitious electrical cars. Sinclair intended it to prove the viability of electric personal transport; the hope was that, just as Sinclair had found with home