Ansar Ali and Mark Edwards, who had worked together at Lotus and then Caterham, founded Zenos in Norfolk in 2012, believing there was a gap in the market for lightweight, modern high-performance sports cars that were affordable to buy and run. They set the price first and then worked out whether a clean-sheet design could be built for it, holding driving days with deposit-holders during development. The name is said to combine “zen”, for purity, with “os”, loosely Latin for vertebra or spine, reflecting the car’s central spine chassis.
The E10 had a chassis designed with Multimatic and a Ford engine, and production of the E10 and E10 S began at Wymondham in January 2015, followed by the more powerful E10 R in January 2016. Zenos built its 100th car in September 2016, and half of production was exported.
After a string of cancelled export orders the company went into administration in January 2017. In March a consortium led by Alan Lubinsky of AC Cars bought the business and its assets, but production in Britain ended, with plans to move it to South Africa and keep engineering in Norfolk.
