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 until late 1979 that Sinclair returned to electric vehicle development. Around Christmas that year, he approached Tony Wood Rogers, an ex-Radionics employee, to carry out consultancy work on "a preliminary investigation into a personal electric vehicle". The brief was to assess the options for producing a one-person vehicle which would be a replacement for a moped and would have a maximum speed of . Although Wood Rogers was initially reluctant, he was intrigued by the idea of an electric vehicle and agreed to help Sinclair. The vehicle was dubbed the C1 (the C standing for Clive). He built a number