Editing Sinclair C5 (section)

===Origins===
Sir Clive Sinclair's interest in the possibilities of electric vehicles originated in the late 1950s during a holiday job for the electronics company Solartron. Fifteen years later, in the early 1970s, he was the head of his own successful electronics company, [[Sinclair Radionics]], based in [[St Ives, Cambridgeshire|St Ives]] in [[Cambridgeshire]]. He tasked one of his employees, [[Christopher Curry (businessman)|Chris Curry]] – later a co-founder of [[Acorn Computers]] – to carry out some preliminary research into electric vehicle design.<ref name="Dale151" />

Sinclair took the view that an electric vehicle needed to be designed from the ground up, completely rethinking the principles of automotive design rather than simply dropping electric components into an established model. He believed that the motor was the key to the design. Sinclair and Curry developed a wafer-thin motor that was mounted on a child's scooter, with a button on the handlebars to activate it. The research got no further, however, as Sinclair's development of the first "slimline" pocket calculator – the [[Sinclair Executive]] and its successors – took precedence. No further work on electric vehicles took place for most of the rest of the 1970s.<ref name="Dale151">{{cite book | title=The Sinclair Story | last=Dale | first=Rodney | page=151 | publisher=Gerard Duckworth | location=London | year=1985}}</ref>