Here are my notes from the recent Caterham Cars webinar. Richard Nichol was joined by Bob Laishley (CEO) and Simon Lambert (CMO, CTO). They spent about 18 minutes of the 1:15 webinar talking about EVs, Seven EV and Project V. Here are my notes:

• RN: When will we see an Electric race series?
• SL: EV’s are not good for circuit racing with. Cadwell can’t even put in a car charger. Most circuits are far-flung and so difficult to get power to. Silverstone looking to put in chargers for visitors only. E-fuels is where we might see some. So there won’t be an EV race series any time soon. Hill climbs are more suited to EVs at the moment.
• RN: How’s the Electric Seven going?
• BL: Project very expensive and was never envisaged to be commercially viable. Gov decision to move from 2030 to 2035 has taken pressure off EVs. They’ve not seen any “organic pressure” from the market for an electric Seven. They will continue to look at it and evolve though. Learnt that can make and package an EV below 700kg. Therefore useful learning exercise.
• BL: The cells that were in that project are the same size as Tesla cells but store 3 times the energy and are 5 times the cost. The material costs alone of building each car were £126k. Who will pay getting on for £200k for an EV Seven.
• BL: Wanted to prove that you could build a 20:20:20… minute drive:charge car.
• BL: Battery in a formula E car costs getting on for £100k
• RN: Is that 125k to build and 200k to sell normal margins?
• BL: Depends on volumes. Just about to re-launch a car in Europe. Will probably only sell 150 cars but homologation costs were about £300k.
• BL: Prices he’s seen for R100 compliant battery pack testing are around £1m. Therefore the numbers don’t add up if only selling 10% of 750 yearly cars as EV.
• BL: Holy Grail is to get battery pack costs down to £100/kWh. Need Chinese levels of volume to get to that cost. CC will be more at £500-£600/kWh.
• RN: Makes the 620 look good value
• RN: What’s the latest on Project V
• BL: Everywhere it appears there is great reception. Demand is not from existing Seven owners. Less than 20% of that demand is from Seven owners.
• BL: Now looking at packaging and choosing suppliers
• BL: Hope to have a prototype car next year
• RN: When hand over first keys
• BL: Early 2027
• RN: UK launch or multi-country
• BL: Like to think UK. But will depend on demand. Will depend on whether that’s a left or right hand drive model. Japan could tip that to RHD.
• BL: Project is going slower than he’d have hoped. But currently in fund raising phase.
• BL: Need to absorb north of £100m
• RN: Will there be a race series for Project V?
• SL: There’s no class for it at the moment. Would like to see a class but by the time we get there a class will probably have a [lower] weight limit that Project V will be a long way under.
• RN: It’s an expanding market, will it stack up against competitors and be competitive.
• BL: Other competitors coming into the market will make the market bigger
• BL: Other companies have much bigger overheads and so CC can do it
• BL: Alpine, need to sell 10k a year, Porsche sell 40k Taycans to make that viable. CC only need 2k a year to be viable
• BL: Don’t think Porsche really a competitor. You have to pay more for a light weight version, CC offering will be light weight to begin with
• RN: Will Project V open up US market
• BL: US already open to CC. Sell lots of cars to US already. No plan to launch in US until a couple of years into life cycle
• BL: Healthy proportion of interest is coming from US though
• BL: Homologation side of business is a big part of what the company does
• BL: May have to crash 9-10 cars to get homologated in US. Each car (at that stage of production) would cost $600k to $1m each. Better to do those tests later when can use production cars.