Longbow's £85K Electric Speedster to Enter Production at Mira Tech Park

British carmaker Longbow will start building its limited-edition electric Speedster at Mira Tech Park in Nuneaton next year, with prospective buyers already on a waiting list to pay around £85,000 for the hand-built sports car.

Co-chief executive Daniel Davey said the West Midlands was the only viable production base. "You cannot build this car anywhere else in the world," he told reporters at the Mira test track. "And if you did, you would be importing UK components to it."

What does the project change for the regional supply chain?

The company secured £3 million from the government's £50 million West Midlands Supplier Readiness and Transformation fund, a pot designed to accelerate the UK's transition to electric vehicle manufacturing. Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds said the cash was meant to strengthen the EV supply chain and the wider industry.

The West Midlands Combined Authority said the grant would be match-funded by Longbow, which plans to manufacture more than 10,000 cars a year once both of its models are in volume production. West Midlands mayor Richard Parker, who approved the £3m award, said the Speedster would be followed by a Roadster and create more than 200 skilled jobs.

"We've been building cars here in West Midlands for 130 years, so what better location for a new generation of carmakers like Longbow," Parker said. "They know this industry inside out and are investing here because this is quite simply the best place in the UK to build a car."

Why does the company need British suppliers?

Davey said Longbow specifically wants components mass-market suppliers don't prioritize. "So you can get heavy components elsewhere, and you can get high-volume components elsewhere; what we're looking for is low-volume, high-quality, low-cost, low-weight," he said. "It's not just the supply chain; you've got the talent here and the know-how."

The Speedster's designers work out of Leamington Spa, with engineers drawn from across the West Midlands and further afield. At Mira, the all-British team showed the car moving from sketch to drivable prototype in less than two years, leaning on regional expertise to keep weight and cost down.

Can the UK actually compete in EVs?

Birmingham-based car industry expert Professor David Bailey framed Longbow as a boutique play, not a volume one. "They're trying to do what Tesla first did many years ago with a sort of lightweight, fast electric sports car," Bailey said. "I think it's great; it shows we have great research and development skills. We can probably compete in terms of low-volume, high-margin cars, but more broadly we need to be doing a lot more to support the auto industry in the region and enable it to continue growing."

What does this mean for practitioners?

For supply-chain chiefs, the deal is a concrete signal: a £3m-and-match injection tied to a named low-volume EV program, anchored at a recognized UK proving ground. The numbers are modest by auto-industry standards, with £85,000 per car, 10,000 cars a year at peak, and 200 jobs on site. But the waiting list already spans multiple continents, and Longbow's bet is that the West Midlands can own a niche the volume players won't touch.

The next test is whether the Roadster, scheduled to follow the Speedster into production, validates that niche at scale and pulls additional UK suppliers into a low-volume, high-margin corner of the EV market.