Here’s how Longbow promises not to be another lightweight British sports car disaster

Aston Martin has gone bust seven times. Bentley was rescued from financial oblivion by VW. Lotus has fallen out with more owners than Man Utd. Heard from TVR lately?

Even when it comes to building simple lightweight cars using someone else’s engine, British sports car makers fall flat on their face more often than Bambi. Elemental, Xenos, Marcos, Bristol, Jensen… we’ve had more plucky sports car makers in this country than Prime Ministers (just).

So when we heard of new outfit Longbow, which is seeking to launch not one but two sub-1,000kg all-electric sports cars with prices from an Alpine-sized £65k, we feared the worst. Another noble plunge into obscurity. So we asked the co-founders, Daniel Davey and Mark Tapscott, how they’ll dodge the fate suffered by the rest.

“Number one, as a company, we and our other co-founder Jenny have done this before,” said Daniel. “[We’ve been at] Tesla, Lucid, Polestar, Chinese manufacturers. There are not many people on the planet that have done it once. We’ve [launched EV makers] four or five times across multiple companies and continents so we know how to build the company side of it.

"A product is not a company. There are a lot of wealthy people who buy a brand name and put a prototype on the road for a couple of million and say ‘look how beautiful it is'. That's not a car company,” he added.

There’s no doubt the Longbow team has experience, but why all the secrecy until now? Most start-ups make an announcement early on so they can begin rounds of fundraising.
“The work we have been doing until our reveal has been all the underlying design, engineering, manufacturing, validation work,” explained Daniel. “We have the layout of our factory, we know our whole vehicle program, we know all the different costs: all of that is mapped out. When we come and give you a number, it's not us plucking a number out of the air. It's validated by our experience selling [EVs], what customers want and what price points lands. Nothing is sexier than a low price.”

The Roadster is set to be priced from £64,995, which finds itself in territory with everything from top-end Caterhams and mid-spec Boxsters to a good £20k less than a new Lotus Emira.

The gents note a cautionary tale of a burgeoning electric vehicle company that went bust “because they had concentration risk of one supplier". Hence why the Longbow twins will be able to use a whole host of different batteries should they stumble into supply bottlenecks. “We can use cylindrical cells, we can use pouch cells, and the chemistry doesn't matter because we aren’t squeezing as much [power] out of it as we can.”

Daniel and Mark also talk about the importance of having the website looking right and bug-free, to build a customer’s confidence when they head over to think about placing a deposit. So the web team has been busy. They’ve not got a factory site chosen yet, but candidates have been identified, as have production line processes and technologies.

But why has no-one bothered to build a pure battery powered driver’s car since the Tesla Roadster? Sure, there’s the electric Maserati Granturismo Folgore, the MG Cyberster, and a handful of glacially slow-selling e-hypercars, but nothing for the lightweight Sunday morning B-road blast or track day enthusiast.

The cynic would say ‘because there’s zero demand’, but the fact is that while the overall car market is down, EV sales share is increasing, despite all the headline-generating headwinds. What’s going on?

Mark’s theory? “The manufacturers have no incentive to build an electric [sports] vehicle. They're not being disrupted. Tesla disrupted the other segments. The Model S disrupted the BMW and 7 Series segment. The Model 3 disrupted everything else and people had to catch up.

“Nothing is disrupting sports cars. There’s only really the MG Cyberster. So we want to do in this space what Tesla have done elsewhere. But this segment isn't interesting for Tesla now, because they're doing two million cars a year. So even if they hit 20,000 or 30,000 sports cars a year (which would be up there with the Corvette and the Porsche 911) it doesn't move the needle on the share price.

“So we're kind of left alone for that reason and everyone's ignoring this space, even when every other segment is fully electrified and moving more in that direction. We’re in ‘green fields’.”

Will those green fields bear a lush crop of new British EV sports cars? We’ll be finding out sooner than most start-ups: there are plans afoot for a working Longbow prototype this summer. We’ll be driving it as soon as we’re allowed, but in the meantime, how do you rate the chances of this bright newcomer to the classic British B-road scene?

To get the full story on the Longbow’s specs (and why it’s been named to annoy Elon Musk) click here...