The Hammerhead Eagle i-Thrust: Top Gear's Homemade Electric Car
A TVR chassis, a milk float motor, two batteries, shelving and a section of garage door. Top Gear's answer to the G-Wiz was briefly called Geoff.
In 2009 the Top Gear presenters agreed on one thing: the G-Wiz was not a good electric car. Their solution was to build a better one themselves. What they built went on to become one of the show's best-loved failures.
The division of labour
The jobs were split three ways. Richard Hammond did the chassis, suspension and brakes. To avoid years of red tape over registering a homemade chassis, he took one from a TVR Chimaera that he'd bought for £5,000 and stripped it. James May did the power. He took the electric motor from a milk float and, noting that the Tesla used thousands of battery cells, decided to save weight and money with two batteries.
Jeremy Clarkson took charge of the bodywork and interior. He began, like all great car designers, with a mood room. Its inspirations included big cats, jet fighters and the actor Peter Bowles. He built the body from aluminium sheet and shelving, and part of it was a section of garage door. Inside, there was a tape player and three-abreast seating, which left the middle passenger's head poking up into a turret made of plastic boxes. The car was briefly named Geoff.
The first drive
With the motor running flat out, May reported a speed of "nearly 10" mph. The presenters took it into Oxford anyway. On the way, the power kept cutting out, including whenever they reversed, and they ended up driving forwards into a buses-only zone. Then it ran out of charge entirely. Clarkson found someone willing to lend them an electrical supply, and May explained that a full charge would take six or seven hours.
Once it moved again, it was overtaken by children and bicycles. A wrong turn then put it on the A34, a 70mph dual carriageway, with a queue building behind.
What went wrong
Two batteries, wiring that disagreed with the indicators, and a plastic-box turret that, by Hammond's account, cooked the passenger's head in the sun. The verdict in the car was that they'd built something worse than a G-Wiz.
The rethink
The presenters rebuilt it and gave it a new name: the Hammerhead Eagle i-Thrust. They took it to the MIRA proving ground to try the EU tests a car needs to be road legal ("with a little cheating", as Wikipedia puts it), then handed it to Autocar magazine for an independent road test. The museum describes the finished car as a diesel-electric hybrid.
The weirdest bit
Three seats in a row, with the middle one's head in a box on the roof. Nobody has copied it.
Where is it now?
The Hammerhead Eagle i-Thrust
In a museumAs of November 2026Grampian Transport Museum, Alford, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Listed in the Grampian Transport Museum Collection, current location 'On display'. The museum notes the sprung push bar is no longer fitted. The museum closes November to March.
Source: Grampian Transport Museum: Hammerhead Eagle i-Thrust
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Related cars in the Quirk Database: Sinclair C5, Toyota WiLL Vi.
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