Sinclair Research worried that Clive Sinclair himself was using his own personal wealth to fund his inventions. By 1990 the company's entire staff had been reduced to just Sinclair himself, a salesman/administrator, and an R&D employee. By 1997 only Sinclair himself was working at his company. In 1992, the "Zike" electric bicycle was released, Sinclair's second attempt at changing people's means of transport. It had a maximum speed of , and was only available by mail order. Much like the C5, the "Zike" was a commercial failure, and sold only 2,000 units. In 1999 Sinclair released the world's smallest radio, in the
Clive Sinclair (author) also been the British Library Penguin Writer's Fellow, as well as a visiting lecturer, most frequently at the University of East Anglia, but also at the University of California, Santa Cruz, his special subjects being gothic fiction, creative writing, detective fiction, and Holocaust literature. His recent books include "Clive Sinclair's True Tales of the Wild West", "A Soap Opera From Hell: Essays on the Facts of Life and the Facts of Death" and "Death & Texas". Sinclair was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1983. Sinclair died in March 2018, aged 70. A posthumous collection of