The Electric Car That Became Britain's Biggest Joke

January 1985. One of Britain's most celebrated inventors unveils what he believes is the future of transport: a low plastic three-wheeler you drive sitting 15 inches off the ground, in London traffic, in the rain. This is the story of the Sinclair C5. Sir Clive Sinclair put pocket calculators and home computers in millions of British hands, got knighted for it, then bet his fortune and his reputation on an electric vehicle the press called a bath on wheels. He built 14,000 of them. He sold roughly 5,000. Within eight months, production stopped and the company collapsed. But here is the strange part: forty years later, cities everywhere are full of exactly what he was trying to build. Small, cheap, electric, personal. The Renault Twizy. The Citroen Ami. Every e-scooter on every street corner. Was the C5 a failure, or just 35 years too early? We cover the man, the machine, the worst launch day in tech history, and the vindication that came too late. The Flop Files is a weekly show about gadgets that promised the future and fell flat on their face. New episode every week.