Littleport resident Mark Robinson restores Sinclair C5 to its former glory

Littleport resident Mark Robinson has lovingly restored a Sinclair C5 – a tiny, electrically-powered tricycle-like vehicle invented by late Cambridge-based entrepreneur Sir Clive Sinclair in 1985.

Mark, 49, purchased the vehicle, which was in a state of disrepair, on Facebook Marketplace for £200 in 2021.

He said: “I’ve no idea how long it had been abandoned for, but it was in a little bit of a state – to say the least.

“Nothing worked on it, the tyres were flat and perished, and it was very much not white anymore, it was quite grubby.

“So I had to strip it all down and renovate the whole thing and get it working again to its former glory.”

Mark describes himself as a car enthusiast (“I’ve got quite a few vehicles”) and notes that the furthest he’s been in the C5 so far is the six miles or so from his home in Littleport to Little Downham.

He says he has received a “very positive” reaction whenever he’s taken it out.

“You can see the older generations recognise it from 40 years ago, but even the younger generation have been quite intrigued by it,” said Mark.

“They always said they were ahead of their time, so maybe if Clive were still with us, if he’d have released them now, you never know, it could have been a completely different story.”

Was restoring the car, which has a maximum speed of about 14mph, a difficult process?

“Yes and no,” said Mark. “The problem with any vehicle of age – especially when they’re such a limited run, as the C5 was – is finding the parts.

“Some parts you can get hold of for a premium price, other parts you can’t – you have to just repair and make the best you can.

“Some parts we had to have 3D printed, because of availability, so it’s just a case of using a bit of expertise and hunting around and seeing what you can find – and using modern technology to recreate things.”

Mark remembers seeing a C5 on display at Dixons in Lion Yard as a child. “In approximately January ’85, I went over there,” he said.

“You could sit in it and have your photo taken; they weren’t available for road-testing or anything like that.

“They were released in January ’85, so it was the first month of release that I saw one.”

Mark, who says he communicates with other C5 owners via Facebook, notes that maybe the world wasn’t quite ready for these electric vehicles back in the mid-80s.

“It was a different time – we were still heavily invested in petrol and diesel, and it wasn’t really a thing to have a vehicle that was electric,” he said.

“And Clive’s idea was for the whole family to be able to use them. You had to be 14 to legally use it on the road, but you didn’t need a licence, you didn’t need to have insurance.

“So once the kids were 14 years or above, the whole family could pop out in them – one each.”

Sir Clive formed his first company aged just 22, Sinclair Radionics, which began supplying radio kits by mail order, and moving his business to Cambridge in 1967.

He lived off Madingley Road for many years, but in later life moved his home and business to London.

Sir Clive Sinclair died in 2021 at the age of 81. The inventor, who pioneered many of his most famous creations in Cambridge in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, had been battling cancer for a decade, his family said.

Cambridge’s Whipple Museum features one of his early inventions – an iconic Sinclair Scientific pocket calculator from 1974.

You can see a C5 for yourself if you visit the The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge where you will also find some of his computer creations.