LONDON — British retro sports-car maker Caterham plans to launch an all-electric coupe that it hopes will give the company a viable future as looming bans on combustion engine cars threaten its core model, the Caterham Seven.
Caterham is showing the Project V three-seat concept at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, alongside an all-electric version of the Seven.
Caterham’s ultra-lightweight Seven open-top two-seaters, powered mostly by Ford gasoline engines, have a strong following among sports-car enthusiasts They are reworked versions of the Lotus Seven roadster last built by Lotus in 1973.
With its electric drivetrain and solid roof, the Project V is more like a traditional coupe and so is a radical departure for the company. It’s due to go on sale in late 2025 or early 2026.
“At some point we will not be able to make a combustion-engine Seven, or even one with an EV powertrain in some markets,” Caterham Cars CEO Bob Laishley told Automotive News Europe. “We need to find something to sustain the brand moving forward.”
The Project V show car was built by Italdesign in a collaboration that Caterham says signals the seriousness of the project.
Caterham, which was bought by Japanese dealer group VT Holdings in 2021, plans to sell around 2,000 units of the car annually, more than triple the current sales of the Seven.
U.S. sales
The car will be offered globally, including the U.S.
Caterham plans to homologate it under normal U.S. rules, rather than use the less stringent Show or Display rules, Laishley said. Work to adapt it for the U.S. will happen after the production car has gone on sale.
Success is not certain, Laishley warned. “It’s a risk. We have not got a queue of people saying ‘make something other than the Seven.’ Quite the opposite.”
With the Project V Caterham is hoping to appeal to its customer base and to a wider audience by sticking as close as possible to the Seven’s core values of lightweight, fun-to-drive simplicity.
The car weighs just 1190 kg, thanks to in part to a chassis made of aluminum and carbon fiber. Infotainment is via smartphone mirroring.
Electric range
A 55-kilowatt-hour battery pack feeds a single 268-hp electric motor mated to the rear chassis to give a 0 to 60 mph (97 kph) acceleration time of 4.5 seconds, according to the company. The production car’s range is expected to be 249 miles (400 km).
VT Holdings has invested more than 100 million pounds to help Caterham develop a car that it hopes will properly challenge rivals, which include upcoming electric sports cars from Lotus, Alpine and Porsche.
“It’s a significant investment,” Laishley said. “Caterham has not had money to invest. Ever.”
The production version of the Project V will cost from 80,000 pounds, ($103,000), substantially higher than the average selling price of the Caterham Seven range at 50,000 pounds.
Caterham has previously tried without success to move away from the Seven, most recently partnering with Renault unit Alpine to jointly develop the car that became the Alpine A110. The deal fell apart in 2014 after Caterham failed to raise its share of the money.
Prior to that it tried to rebody the Seven as a coupe called the 21 in 1994. Production stopped in 2000 after just 48 cars were built.
Combustion engine bans
Caterham faces the prospect of halting sales of its combustion engine cars in 2030 in the U.K. when the government plans to ban the sale of cars powered by fossil fuels, five years ahead of a similar ban in the EU. Britain is Caterham’s biggest market, accounting for more than half of its revenue.
The company lost 408,845 pounds in the 15 months to the end of March 2022, when it moved to a new financial year. The company has blamed supply problems for the loss.
Caterham hopes to do just enough to homologate the car under the European Small Series Type Approval for low-volume manufacturers without adding to costs or spoiling its lightweight ethos.
“It sounds a terrible thing to say, but we will not be chasing NCAP ratings,” Laishley said, referring to the European crash standards where automakers aim to achieve high ratings. The NCAP standards are not legally binding.
The current Caterham Seven was homologated under European rules stretching back to the early 1990s. “Ideally that is what we would like to do [with Project V], but we cannot,” Laishley said.
The company has recently expanded its factory in the town of Caterham 30 km south of London that builds the Seven to clear an order backlog, but it is looking to make the Project V car elsewhere either in the U.K. or in continental Europe.