Zenos E10 Returns at £115,000, A Different Car Entirely

A decade after bankruptcy, Zenos is selling sports cars again. The British marque, now under AC Cars' ownership, has revived the E10 for 2027 with reservations open and first deliveries scheduled for Q2, offered in a 300-hp r2 and a 380-hp rZ, both running a six-speed manual. The base price is £115,000. That number does most of the work in this story.

What AC Cars Actually Revived

The provenance is straightforward and slightly strange. Zenos was founded in 2013 by Mark Edwards and Ansar Ali, both Caterham and Lotus veterans, as a clean-sheet track-day rival built to a very keen price, and in 2016 it went bankrupt.Two months later AC Cars bought the assets, completed and sold a small number of unfinished E10s, suspended production, and in 2024 announced plans to relaunch the brand with the E10 RZ for 2026. That is a long runway for a small sports car, and the car arriving at the end of it is not the car that went in.

The powertrain is the clearest signal. The base r2 runs a turbocharged 2.3-litre four-cylinder making 300 bhp at 6,000 rpm and 313 lb-ft, in a car weighing 790 kg. The rZ pushes the same architecture to 380 hp. The engine, per the trade press, is a Ford EcoBoost, the same unit family you will find in a Focus ST, deployed here in a car under 800 kilos. The curb weight is the point. Power-to-weight at 380 hp and 790 kg is Porsche-911-GT3 territory on paper, from a four-cylinder in a British niche-market roadster.

Volume will stay small. Reporting out of the revival suggests fewer than 50 units planned across both variants in the first full production year, which is less a factory and more a workshop with a waiting list.

£115,000 Moves the E10 Into a Different Fight Entirely

The original E10 launched at roughly £24,995. The new base is £115,000. Even accepting a decade of inflation and the economics of hand-building 50 cars a year, that is approximately 4.5× the launch price in nominal terms, and it moves the car out of the bracket it was invented to occupy.

A hundred and fifteen thousand pounds is Porsche 911 Carrera T money. It is also Lotus Emira money, with change. Those are cars with dealer networks, warranty infrastructure, residual-value data going back years, and, in the Porsche's case, the single most durable sports-car badge on the market. The Zenos pitch against them is weight: an Emira weighs about 1,458 kg, and the Carrera T weighs more. A 790-kg car with 380 hp will out-accelerate both on a dry circuit. Whether a buyer at this price point values that above the Porsche's everything-else is the question the order book will answer.

The original Zenos thesis, accessible track-day purity for Caterham-adjacent money, is gone. What has replaced it is a scarcity-and-weight play against established marques with much deeper benches. The engineering case is coherent; the engineering case was coherent in 2016 too. The commercial case is new, and it is the one worth watching. A sub-50-unit production run can clear at £115k in a strong year on brand curiosity alone. Year two is harder.

The number to check in Q2 2027 is not the horsepower. It is how many of the 50 cars the first owners keep.