Earlier this month, the television cameras came to Warwickshire. BBC News and ITV brought the Business Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, and the Mayor of the West Midlands, Richard Parker, to the HORIBA MIRA proving ground near Nuneaton to meet a small British start-up called Longbow Motors, and to announce a £3 million grant from the West Midlands Combined Authority to help it grow. The reason for all the attention can be stated in a single number: the company's first car weighs 895 kilograms.
In full disclosure I am an interested party. As a partner at Beyond Capital, an investment firm in Dallas, Texas, and we have backed Longbow. Over this past year I have got to know its founders, Daniel Davey and Mark Tapscott, and I am now helping the company think about its future in America. So I am not a neutral observer. The reason this car has stayed with me has less to do with business than it does with some of my Ragamuffin thoughts I have been noodling.
Modern vehicles have become heavy in a way my grandparents would find absurd. Bigger bodies, bigger batteries, more screens, more motors, more of everything: plenty of electric cars now weigh well over two tonnes. Longbow's founders came out of Tesla and Lucid and asked the opposite question…not what a car could gain, but what it could lose. The Speedster weighs 895 kg; the Roadster, 995 kg. Both come in under a tonne. “Weight is the enemy of everything,” Tapscott says. “It hurts efficiency, agility, braking, fun, and even sustainability.” It is an old British idea, really. Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus, built a legend on it: “Simplify, then add lightness.” Shelby shocked the racing world with Ford.
Hebrews writes of the Christian life as a race: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith” (Heb. 12:1–2, NRSV). Notice the distinction there is the sin that clings and then there is…the weight. I have never really noticed that before. Not everything that slows a runner is wicked. Some of it is simply heavy: possessions we maintain more than we use, commitments we took on in a different season, calendars with no margin, churches running programs nobody would choose again but nobody dares to stop. Our consumer culture trains us to solve every problem by addition. Scripture, and a small car company in Warwickshire, suggest the opposite discipline: subtraction.
I write this as a man who knows something about carrying weight he was never meant to carry, and about the long, unglamorous work of setting it down. Lightness, in my experience, is never an accident. Nobody drifts into it. It is chosen, repeatedly, against the pull of more.
There is a second lesson in how Longbow works. The first people were put in a garden “to till it and keep it” (Gen. 2:15, NRSV) to cultivate, and to guard. Stewardship is exactly that pairing: make something fruitful, and refuse to waste what you have been given. By the company's account, Longbow took its car from renderings to a driving prototype in under six months, for less than £10 million, a small fraction of what the big manufacturers typically spend over years, building in Britain with a largely British supply chain and creating skilled jobs in the West Midlands. A lighter car uses fewer materials and less energy every mile it travels. Doing more with less is not cheapness. Done well, it is craftsmanship; and craftsmanship is a spiritual category. “Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord and not for your masters” (Col. 3:23, NRSV). Work done as for the Lord may show in the details, in what is made, and in what is deliberately left off.
A word of honesty, though, because Christians should be the first to insist on it. A sports car costing the best part of £65,000 will not save the world, and we should be wary, I include myself in this of baptizing the things we happen to make, sell or own. Longbow cars are beautiful, unnecessary things, and there is a place in a good creation for beautiful, unnecessary things; the Lord who made peacocks and sunsets is not a bare utilitarian. But the gospel is not a marketing strategy, and I am not asking you to buy a car. The claim I am making is smaller and, I hope, sturdier: that the manner of our work and the weight of our lives are spiritual questions, and that a culture of endless more….more weight, more speed, more stuff is quietly at odds with a faith that speaks of enough.
So here is the question Longbow's car has left me with, and I offer it to readers of en for what it is worth. What is the weight you are carrying that is not sin, exactly, but is slowing the race? For a church, it might be a building, a budget or a calendar that now serves itself. For a family, it might be a standard of living that costs the very people it was meant to bless. For a business, it might be growth pursued because growth is what businesses do. The writer to the Hebrews does not tell us to run faster. He tells us to run lighter…eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. Less, held faithfully, can be more. It usually is.
About the author: W. Scott Wilson is a General Partner at Beyond Capital and Senior Vice President of Strategy & Growth at ChurchillTerry, in Dallas, Texas. He writes Ragamuffin Musings, on faith, sobriety and impact investing, at wscottwilson.com. He is a husband and father, and, by grace, a ragamuffin.