"electric shock"

On seeing the Hipercar for the first time, one wag suggested it showed why the Somerset company hadn’t bothered with bodywork on its previous models. Conventional it is not. Something a ten-year-old would draw in their maths book when dreaming of Batman’s next car it might be. As the marketing types say, it started the conversation.

It also distracted a little from what is beneath the Hipercar’s carbonfibre body, namely the work of a long-standing, tireless project Ariel has been at the centre of since 2017 and which has now made its debut.