The electric car company that brought Ferraris and Bugattis to THE HEAT

Founded in 2019 as The Little Car Company, Hedley Studios builds handcrafted electric cars in association with brands such as Ferrari, Bugatti, Aston Martin and Bentley. It takes scans of classic cars and scales them down typically to 75% of their original size, while ensuring that the chassis, suspension and handling remain faithful to the original. “We don’t make them the same size because people don’t like replicas of the original,” says Hedley, a serial entrepreneur and former world-class speed skier. “We reinterpret them for the brands. They’re fully sanctioned, so we make the only Ferraris that haven’t been made by Ferrari, meaning we have to make them to Ferrari standards.”

The business started when Hedley, 47, was approached by Bugatti six years ago to reinvent an electric toy car from the 1920s for six- to eight year-olds. Hedley had the idea to make the car bigger so that it could be driven by adults. He announced the project at the 2019 Geneva Motor Show. “Suddenly I had over 500 expressions of interest overnight, and I realised I had a business here,” he says.

Hedley Studios’ mission is to show that electric vehicles (EVs) don’t have to be boring. “A lot of petrolheads [car fanatics] are like, ‘I can’t stand EVs’. We’re trying to bridge that gap, and show that EVs can be used in a clever way — just don’t stick batteries in a 2.5-tonne SUV, because you’ll turn it into a 3.5 tonne SUV.”

Hedley Studios is not his first rodeo. He has founded five startups, including Clear, the first government-approved carbon-offsetting company, and his own online learning business, the Expert Academy. He competed for Britain for a decade as a speed skier, reaching eighth in the world and a fastest speed of 182.7km/h — before retiring after an 177km/h crash at the 2017 FIS World Speed Skiing Championships, which left him with a broken neck, arm and ribs.