More evidence that car people are the same the world over. In the way that some Chinese engineers recently thought a flat-eight engine was perfect for a motorbike, others have decided to make a niche, smaller-than-an-Alpine-A110 and (relatively) lightweight electric sports car.
The 1365kg JMEV SC01 is “the first electric sports car done properly”, they say.
The engineers are making noises about it having “no excess” and wanting to “prove that electric cars can still be raw [and] mechanical in feeling”. Those are the same noises that engineers from anywhere could make.
In decades past, the Western car industry was terrified of companies from Japan and later South Korea arriving to eat everyone’s lunch, what with their properly made if cheap and boring cars.
Yet now look: Hyundai knows that enthusiasts are the last to be emotionally moved by electric cars and launched the Ioniq 5 N to remedy that.
The Japanese have been into lightweight sports cars for much longer still. When Honda wanted motorcycle enthusiasts to take it seriously, it knew it had to enter the Isle of Man TT races (which it soon won, obviously).
When it boils down to it, true car people want largely the same thing: entertainment.
On an industrial level, the threat of Chinese manufacturing, owing to the ambition of the state and its scale, is probably bigger than any of those that have come before. It really could do to this continent’s car industry what Japanese bikes did to the British motorcycle industry.
Yet on a smaller, more personal level, there are just car people out there doing car people things.
Notwithstanding the fact that I haven’t even seen it, let alone driven it or weighed it, the SC01 suggests they get fired up by exactly the same things as us.
On some social media disgrace or other, I follow the adventures of a guy from Aso who keeps a polished Lotus Mk6 in a tiny city garage and spends his weekends driving it into beautiful Japanese hills to meet his mates who also have lovely British classic cars.
What chance that, in a few years’ time, I will be doing the same with someone from Nanjing?
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