‘There’s a whole new category of exotic, mysterious, slightly mad, possibly shortlived manufacturers’

THE CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION occurred half a billion years ago, and even though we’ve had all this time to study it we still don’t really understand what happened. No, it doesn’t refer to a prehistoric industrial accident, it’s the name given to a 30-million-year period when the Earth’s oceans suddenly flourished and bloomed. Life was turbocharged, rapidly evolving from a few blobby cells into a rich, diverse, 12-part David Attenborough series of wildly imaginative creatures. It’s almost as though nature was let off the leash before it knew what it was doing: so there were deep-water creepy-crawlies with multiple legs and sharp spines and tentacles coming out of their heads; creatures with claws and five eyes and beaky mouths on stalks; animals that dived, swam, floated and crawled. There were thousands of trippy, experimental new species.

Meanwhile, it seems like there’s never been a better time to start a new car brand. As well as the ‘new establishment’ like Tesla and (arguably) Rimac, there’s a whole new category of exotic, mysterious, slightly mad, possibly short-lived manufacturers springing up, with made-up names like Lucid, Nio, Faraday, Elextra, Uniti and Xing. True, you could argue that all names are ultimately made up, but compared to Datsun Cherry or Ferrari Daytona there’s something particularly artificial about a car called the Lynk & Co 01.

There are all sorts of reasons for this sudden fertility in the car world: there’s the disruption caused by the big tech brands like Google and Uber; there’s global warming and CO2 reduction; and there’s the ready availability of low-volume materials. Basically, all you need is a carbonfibre chassis (easy), a lithiumion battery (you can probably buy them in Asda these days) and a catchy new name like Fznenon or Tryp+Plus or Xzypp. (Note: these names are available for licensing or purchase; contact Mr M Walton, CAR magazine.)

But this isn’t the first time that automotive brands have sprung up like this. Back in the Edwardian era, there was another, sudden Cambrian Explosion in car manufacturing. After Karl Benz kicked it off in 1885 and before the Model T came along and introduced mass-produced uniformity in the 1920s, the primordial automotive soup was swimming with eager, hopeful start-ups pursuing a glorious diversity of layouts. Just as today we have hybrids, plug-ins, petrol, hydrogen and bio-fuel all competing for supremacy, back in the early 1900s there was steam, petrol, electric motors, cars with two engines, some with four, with capacities that ranging from a few cc to a dozen gas-guzzling litres.

To choose a few examples at random, there was Aberdonia, based in London, which built a mid-engined 3.2-litre seven-seater in 1911; there was Carl Opperman, a former watchmaker based in Clerkenwell, London, who built electric cars between 1898 and 1907. There were manufacturers in Yorkshire, like Tiny, which built cars with air-cooled V-twin engines; and in Scotland, like Dalgliesh-Gullane, that built a two-seater with a 1.2-litre single-cylinder engine.

There was even a car manufacturer called Pick Motors in my sleepy hometown of Stamford in Lincolnshire. Stamford doesn’t make anything nowadays, except maybe fudge and postcards – the idea of us having our very own car manufacturer is both wonderful and bizarre.

Meanwhile in the US there was Rambler, at one time one of the biggest brands in America. Rambler made cars between 1902 and 1916 and it’s acknowledged as a pioneer in the introduction of the steering wheel, instead of a boat-style tiller. That’s like natural selection deciding that a tail flipper is actually more useful that a tentacle coming out your forehead. And there was Duryea, which started making cars in 1893 and almost beat Henry Ford to build the first mass-produced ‘people’s car’.

And have you heard of any of them? Probably not. And in 100 years, no one will have heard of Lucid, Faraday or Elextra either. If there is a moral to this story, it is simply that we should enjoy this current automotive explosion while its lasts – I suspect a mass extinction is just around the corner.