Fail of the century #9: Reva G-Wiz

Top Gear has a soft spot for cars that serve up a frisson of danger. Thing is, we generally prefer this frisson to occur when, for example, trying to hold a third-gear skid around Hammerhead, rather than when navigating an urban mini-roundabout at 15mph.

Yes, the Reva G-Wiz was pulse-quickening in all the wrong ways. On the positive side it was, in conception, a car ahead of its time: all-electric, compact, light. Reva promised it would do 50 miles on a charge, which may indeed have been true so long as you at no point planned to use the heater, or headlights, or brakes, and your start point was several thousand metres higher than your destination.

On the (significantly weightier) negative side, the G-Wiz was appalling in every department. Especially safety. To describe it as having crisp-packet build quality would be to defame the average crisp packet. Reva famously never crash tested the G-Wiz, on the grounds it was NCAP-exempt due to being officially classified as a quadricycle (albeit one marketed as an urban family car). In a rare moment of genuine consumer journalism, in 2007 we purchased a G-Wiz and subjected it to a proper NCAP crash test. The results were predictably gory.

As the world’s best selling EV for several years (just... how?) the G-Wiz arguably did more to set back the electric car cause than every brilliant, desirable petrol car combined. Who needs enemies when you’ve got friends like these?