Britain has a new lightweight sports car, the Mika Meon, and it has given me new hope about the potential of electrification within this particular micro-corner of the market.
Robin Hall and his team opened up the Mika office and workshop premises when I visited to test the Meon recently. Hall is a design engineer by trade. His company, Hall Engineering and Design, has been built on computer-aided design, which he does for all manner of clients.
He has a 3D printer in his office kitchen for producing prototype parts and a 3D scanner for the reverse engineering of existing ones. So there’s nothing antiquated, backwards or even particularly ordinary about this clean-sheet electric beach buggy design.
“Typically, the makers of niche sports cars like ours rely on a lot of parts bin components,” Hall told me.
“We’ve taken some off the shelf for the Meon, where that makes sense [ball joints, bushings and minor cabin components, for example]. But where we can get an advantage by designing our own parts – making them ourselves too, often – we will. That way, we needn’t adapt one part in order to squeeze in another; we get exactly what we want.”
The Meon’s brake calipers, for instance, are of Hall’s own design, machined from billet on site. Its front hub carriers are likewise proprietary, giving Hall ultimate control of attachment points and front-axle geometry (he previously designed the front hubs for the R50-generation Mini hatchback).
Hall is the kind of person who takes Henry Royce’s old maxim of “take the best that exists and make it better; if it does not exist, design it” rather seriously.
Mika’s chief technician, Dave Watt, showed me how the Meon’s chassis and axles come together. Lengths of tube- and box-section steel come in one door, finished chassis eventually go out of another and a lot of cutting, bending, bolting and welding of metal – much of it done by hand – goes on in between.
