World's first electric racer ready for debut

The world's first electric racing sportscar, made by a Black Country firm, makes its track debut in August, it was revealed today.

Dudley's Westfield Sportscars Ltd, of Dudley Road, Kingswinford, is taking customers on a world tour, for six-10 races in the UK, USA and Europe.

Westfield, which recently signed a £30million-a-year deal with Malaysian firm DRB-HICOM, is the first firm to create the high-powered racing electric sportscars.

Managing director Julian Turner said he believed the new kind of cars were "the future" of racing driving. "The thing is, there's a lot more torque — you can go from nought to 60 in a much faster time as you've got instant power, whereas traditional cars are gear-based.

"We've developed some very clever programming to make this possible.

"It is the future — more and more manufacturers will start to create these kind of cars, and we just want to make sure we're ahead of the pack."

Mr Turner, aged 33, of Kingswinford, took in December 2006, and has worked to build it up. Unfortunately, he said, he took over just before the recession took hold and banks refused to lend to fund the project.

"We had no help from any of the banks at all — no overdraft facility, no loans, nothing," he said. "We were faced with the position where we had to find all the funding for this project ourselves, which we did through our shareholders."

Another problem was legislation. He said designers found themselves in the unusual situation of having to make the car louder. "It's extremely quiet so we have had to design noise into it," he said.

"This was to meet health and safety legislation. We carried out a test at our site where we drove along behind someone walking, and they didn't even know we were there. Pedestrians quite often rely on their hearing to tell if cars are there, so we needed to make sure there was some kind of noise."

After battling red tape to get cars to EU specifications and registered as road vehicles, Westfield have sold 70 in the past year. There are two models available to buy — the Sport EV, a road car, and the I-Racer.

Mr Turner said developing technology proved to be the catalyst for great things to come. After the unveiling of the car, the Malaysian deal got underway and was signed at the beginning of this year.

This will mean the firm will be tripling production, not only bringing £30million a year revenue to the region, including Westfield and its suppliers, most of which are based in the Black Country — but will also mean the firm will double its workforce.

Mr Turner said recruitment of 35-50 new workers would begin towards the end of the year, when production is due to begin.

Expansion will see Westfield move from its current home on the Gibbons Industrial Estate, where it has been since 1982, to a bigger location. Mr Turner said he would look at staying in the Black Country, and in Dudley if possible — but he warned that if business rates were not competitive, he would be forced to move elsewhere.

"We're a company that's in the position of being able to move anywhere in the country at the moment," he said.

"There are a lot of people who would bite our arm off if we moved to their area.

"It's my objective to stay in this area as that's where our skills base is, it's where our workers are and it's where most of our suppliers are. But at the end of the day, I need to do what's best for the company."