British start-up Longbow involves captains of industry

Longbow, the creation of former executives from McLaren, Alpine and Lotus, plans to sell a pair of lightweight electric sports cars in late 2027.

The company will launch with two $NZ150,000 electric sports cars that it says will weigh under 1000kg each.

Mike Flewitt, Michael van der Sande and Dan Balmer all joined the firm’s advisory board. The co-founder, engineer Daniel Davey, formerly worked for both Tesla and Lucid.

Longbow announced its first projects, an open-roof Speedster and Roadster coupé, in March. They will use an aluminium chassis and should complete a 0-100 run in 3.5sec. Each weighs in at 895kg and offers claimed range of 440km.

Everything apart from the battery cells is from the UK. Initial deliveries start at the end of 2027.

Davey admitted the task ahead is not without risks, which is why the founders established a new advisory board. To minimise risk, “what you need…is people who’ve done it before,” he said. “That informs the plan that we already have.”

Co-founder, Mark Tapsott, came from BYD. He said Longbow is about “car people building cars. We wanted to work with the right partners.”

Former McLaren boss, Mike Flewitt, told Autocar that “It all started with the car,” and then the people and the company. 

He added: “I have a personal passion for lightweight sports cars…” which is something he says is slowly being lost from the industry.

“To see somebody coming in with leading-edge technology and with those attributes at the forefront is quite novel, and it really stood out to me.”

However, Flewitt emphasised that the car needs to be viable. Board member van der Sande agreed. He is a former boss of Alpine, Lucid Europe and JLR’s Special Vehicles division.

“Having done this a few times, there are definitely arbitrations, things to be done around complexity, attributes, tooling, sourcing, manufacturing, methods, automation, materials.

“There’s many…things that are very alien to mass manufacturers. “It is about…finding the right alliances, suppliers and partners.”