RIP Thread

[KlaxonCow]

I've just re-watched Micro Men and was looking at videos about the C5, and then discovered that Uncle Clive had considered giving it another go.

The "sequel" to the C5, the Sinclair X1:



It never came to market. But you can see that it's, like, "the C5 re-born". And it starts to fix some of the C5's problems. This one is taller - so less dangerous and more comfy to ride - with the handlebars in front of you, rather than under your legs, and actually has a roof on it to keep the rain off.

And this kind of leans into my point that if Sir Clive had committed to making an "all-weathered electric bike" and sold that, rather than pretensions of it being an "electric car", then I reckon it would have been more accepted and successful.

If the C5 had looked like the X1 then, okay, it's still a bit weird but I think more people would have gotten the concept and bought into it.

Essentially, somewhere between an e-bike, and an electric moped with pedals. A hybrid form factor.

But, anyway, yeah, I didn't know, until I discovered this, that Uncle Clive had kept the dream alive and had worked on a successor to the C5. It never released - amongst other things, other companies were now developing electric cars and e-bikes, and he needed to be even more innovative than this to keep up - but he clearly never thought the idea was wrong, as he never gave up on the dream, despite the failure and ridicule poured on the C5.

And, as I say, I think he won the moral victory, in the end. Electric cars are not a joke anymore. It wasn't him that made it happen, sadly. But the EV is a real thing and, when new ICE cars are banned in 2030, they become the inevitable future.

It didn't start with Elon Musk and Tesla, or even the EV-1 from GM. It started with Sir Clive.

[merman]

There were electric vehicles before the C5.

[KlaxonCow]

There were electric vehicles before the C5.

I know. Indeed, there were electric vehicles before the invention of the internal combustion engine. EVs are the older technology.

Here's Dan Snow recapping some of the history of EVs and ICEs and the quest for oil:



Why is everyone so down on acknowledging Sir Clive's place in all of this? I guess doing so breaks the narrative - the "orthodoxy" - that it was a bad idea and an object to laugh at and all that. And so strong is that narrative, let's piss on the memory of a dead man who clearly wasn't wrong in his "vision" at all, even if there was no bloody way he was ever going to do it justice with '80s tech.

Okay, whatever. Is this a C64 vs. Spectrum thing? Because, you know, I was a C64 guy.

Though the first computer I touched and programmed was a ZX81, so I'm going to doff my hat to Sir Clive, even if this is weirdly somehow a controversial stance, apparently (?!?).

[KlaxonCow]

Computerphile did a video in tribute to Sir Clive and his part in the British Computer Revolution:




But I also noticed a comment in the comment section of the video, by "Guess Undheit", that grabbed my attention:

Sadly, Spectrums weren't sold where I lived in Canada, and never got to use them. But anyone with their salt knows and respects how important Sinclair and his computers were. One thing that bothers me about many obituaries is how they seem to mock Sinclair for his failures, not celebrate him for his achievements.

The rest of the world looks on, outside of our "media bubble" which says he was a big bald ginger failure to laugh at, and they really have no idea what the fuck we're doing.

This Canadian is baffled and scratching his head, wondering why obituaries to this man of many achievements - the pocket calculator, the digital watch, bringing affordable computing to the masses, a long-time Chairman of Mensa, etc. - are all having immense fun mocking him, and not celebrating his life. Which is, you know, supposed to be somewhat the point of an obituary.

I have to agree. I don't entirely get it either. It's surely not normal to have arguments in the "RIP thread"? That even if you don't share the same fond remembrances of the dead party, that you at least have the decorum to leave people to their own. Would that not be standard "don't speak ill of the dead" protocol?

Show me on the doll where Rupert Murdoch's rags mentally abused your childhood to make you think this way.

[zip accident]

Show me on the doll where Rupert Murdoch's rags mentally abused your childhood to make you think this way.

It was, according to Wikipedia, Amalgamated Press, I thought it was Thompson comics. Thompson comics made the Beano, the Dandy, The Topper, The Beezer and maybe a couple of dozen others, but Amalgamated Press made the Educational paper for properly brought up children called Jack and Jill, and it was utterly vile and appalling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_and_Jill_(comics)

There were no speach bubbles, all text was below the images it described, and the worst of it rhymed (in a barely rhymes, and barely tells a story, but it's what the boss wants and I need the money, kind of way).

This was long before Murdoch bought his way out of Australia.

[tufty]

Why is everyone so down on acknowledging Sir Clive's place in all of this?

Because Sir Clive's place in all of this was the production of an abject failure that arguably put the development of serious electric vehicles back by a decade or more.

He did a lot of good, even if it wasn't where his real aspirations were, with the introduction of the ZX80, ZX81 and Spectrum. Where previous (and later competing) computers were in the multiples of hundreds of pounds, he brought them to everybody, and largely kicked off the democratisation of computing in the UK.

But his vision of electric vehicles was hamstrung by the technology of the time, resulting in a vehicle that was little more than a toy, no better as transport than the humble bicycle (and actually worse in most respects). Add onto that the awful marketing, and it could only ever be a flop. Which would have been fine, but the electric vehicle has been tainted by the reputation of the C5 ever since.

[KlaxonCow]

But his vision of electric vehicles was hamstrung by the technology of the time, resulting in a vehicle that was little more than a toy, no better as transport than the humble bicycle (and actually worse in most respects). Add onto that the awful marketing, and it could only ever be a flop. Which would have been fine, but the electric vehicle has been tainted by the reputation of the C5 ever since.

I'll take that criticism. I basically made it myself.

That the battery tech of the '80s could not do any justice to the "vision" of an electric car. And what Sir Clive actually produced was a battery-assisted recumbent bike - and he should have sold it as that, and doubled-down, making it actually bike-like (well, I think moped-like would have been the ideal form factor, so you're sitting up high, but more comfortable than a traditional pedal bike and then, like the X1 he later developed, stick a roof or canopy over it for the rain).

I don't know that we can say that it tainted the reputation of electric vehicles and held them back, though.

As gravy rightly said, for the electric car, the battery is the problem. The electric vehicle has matured about as fast as the batteries to make them possible emerged.

And, of course, developments like General Motor's EV-1 and then Tesla, all happened in America, untainted by anything Sir Clive did, as they have no idea who he is. That he could have had no real effect on Japanese Nissan, in their development of the Nissan Prius or Leaf.

And did the reputation of the C5 affect take up of EVs in the UK? By the stats, not really.

Looking at Wikipedia, China sold 1,246,000 EVs in 2020. Then Germany at 394,632. Then the United States at 297,939. Then France at 194,881. Then we find the UK at 175,082 EVs sold in 2020.

This is more than the 145,099 EVs sold in California - the state whose "clean air" legislation created the EV-1 (which inspired Tesla). This is more than the 113,588 of Norway (which is often held up as a success story as 17.2% of all cars are electric up there - they have the highest ratio, but a smaller population, so the absolute numbers are, in fact, lower than the UK's), the 96,054 of Sweden, the 87,946 of the Netherlands, the 29,000 of Japan (who pioneered the Prius and Leaf).

If we look at the cumulative totals, not just the 2020 sales, then the UK is on 434,282. Which is perfectly comparable to France's 470,295 or Norway's 480,008. All in the same ballpark, suggesting that the UK is NOT actually at all unusual, or "held back", compared to other countries. And these numbers beat the Netherlands, Japan, Canada and Sweden.

Whilst "correlation does not equal causation", what you can't have is causation where there is no correlation. You can't say that he "tainted the reputation of EVs", if you can't demonstrate that there is, in fact, any "taint" on the reputation of EVs in the UK in the first place. He can't be responsible for a thing that's not actually real.

And could it have held up the development of EVs? Not when all this - what we might call "the modern wave of EVs" - all kicked off in America and California, specifically. And also in Japan (the Prius and Leaf, which were the important early "mass market" EVs, while Tesla was only selling expensive supercars). They've never heard of Sir Clive.

And, as mentioned, for an electric car, it's the battery that matters. And the modern EV development has more or less matured in lock step, alongside the lithium ion battery making it possible.

I mean, this is what we were saying about Sir Clive. Without the battery tech, you couldn't pull this off. You end up with a compromised e-bike, like the C5. You couldn't - give or take a few years - have done this any sooner than it happened. You need the battery tech, and that's only been realistically with us, pretty much in tandem with how it's actually gone.

The point being that before you can say "Sir Clive damaged the reputation of EVs" then you first have to prove that EVs have a damaged reputation in the first place. And before you can say "he held up the development and public acceptance of EVs", you have to prove that development was actually held up, and that public acceptance has been held back.

But, simply, none of the numbers you can find actually back that up. He can't be to blame for a thing that, in fact, can't even be proven is actually real.


(If EVs have been held back, then we need to look to GM never selling the EV-1, only leasing it, and then taking them all back and crushing them, because they proved too popular. We need to look to the fossil fuel lobby propagandising against new tech that doesn't need their fuels. We need to look to the established car manufacturers, who need to shift their ICE stock and whose whole manufacturing process is rigged for ICE, not EV - they've been slow to catch up, but understandably so, as this is a complete technology and infrastructure change for them. Giant corporations aren't nimble, but they are now genuinely shifting because the smaller upstarts - like Tesla, who never had any "legacy" ICE stuff to worry about, so can move nimbly on this new tech - are making them look silly right now. Oh, and then there's Clarkson and the other "boy racers", who've dumped crap on EVs, just because they don't go "vroom, vroom" with loud engine noises to make them feel like a powerful Alpha Male - and also probably because Clarkson's mates are all, as we know, establishment figures who've got fingers in fossil fuel pies and would expect their mate to do them a favour.

"Who Killed the Electric Car?" (condensed 6 minute version of the film):



Yeah, no-one's mentioning Sir Clive and his C5 in this.)

[KlaxonCow]

Correction: Of course, it's Toyota, not Nissan, who made the Prius. Still a Japanese company, and the Leaf is Nissan, so the actual overall point still holds. But just realised, reading it back, I'd got my Japanese car manufacturers mixed up a little there. The Prius was, of course, a hybrid, not a pure electric, but it was still instrumental, in the early EV days, in acclimatising folks to electric vehicles (and, arguably, back then, the petrol tank was needed to ease "range anxiety" to make people prepared to give it a go).

[PFVA]

A very controversial person who died last month of Covid 19.

(I just found out now)

The father of Pakistan’s atomic weapons industry and the greatest proliferator of nuclear weapons in history, Abdul Qadeer Khan, who has died aged 85 after testing positive for Covid-19, was heralded as a hero in his native country, but he left a troubling legacy for the west

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... n-obituary

[KlaxonCow]

[Jonesey]

Dean Stockwell's carked it. RIP Al.

[gilesgoat]

... you ever got that feeling that "the world you knew and liked (up to a point) is vanishing" and in the "new" one you can't find that many things you REALLY like ?

[MattyP]

... you ever got that feeling that "the world you knew and liked (up to a point) is vanishing" and in the "new" one you can't find that many things you REALLY like ?

All the time. I guess its just getting older and having different values to the constantly evolving society we are part off. Like parents used to say "In my day it was a much nicer place to live..." when in fact it probably wasn't. Just different.

[RedOktober]

The trouble is that society seems to change every day, and I'm pretty sure nothing really happened in the 70's.

[MattyP]

The trouble is that society seems to change every day, and I'm pretty sure nothing really happened in the 70's.

Probably technology that has enabled this as we are seemingly constantly fed info all the time. Think that is one aspect I find frustrating is how "agile" everything seems to be at the moment - nothing seems that stable. And if you don't keep an eye on things you feel out of the loop with everything. Sometimes I really feel I want to go "off grid" build a log cabin and just hibernate from all of it.