British EV start-up unveils £18k city car — and the order book opens at midnight

After five years in stealth, Coventry-based Marlowe Motors reveals its first production model.

Coventry-based electric vehicle start-up Marlowe Motors has, after five years in stealth, finally taken the wraps off its first production model — and the £18,000 price tag has caught everyone by surprise.

The Marlowe Mk1, a compact city car with a claimed real-world range of 220 miles, is designed and engineered entirely in the UK and uses a domestically sourced battery pack from a new plant in Sunderland.

Reservations open at midnight tonight with a fully refundable £100 deposit, and industry sources say early demand metrics from the company's website have already exceeded internal projections.

Established manufacturers have so far reacted with polite scepticism, questioning whether the price can realistically be sustained once production scales.