Fifty years ago this past May, a factory on the island of Syros shut its doors for good, ending what could have been one...

Fifty years ago this past May, a factory on the island of Syros shut its doors for good, ending what could have been one of the most remarkable industrial stories in modern Greek history. The car it produced, the Enfield E8000, was a fully electric, aluminum-bodied two-seater with an 80-kilometer range, zero emissions, and a drag coefficient of 0.29. Those are numbers that would be respectable on a showroom floor today. The man behind it was Andros-born shipowner Yannis Goulandris, who purchased the British Enfield brand in the late 1960s, a company that had previously manufactured rifles. He also owned the Neorion shipyards in Syros. When the British Electricity Board held a competition to produce 100 to 120 electric city vehicles, Goulandris entered and beat both Ford and Leyland, the dominant British car brand of the era. Production began on the Isle of Wight, where 12 cars were built before a workers' strike prompted Goulandris to shut the English operation and relocate everything to Syros, into an old textile factory near the shipyards. The lead engineer, MIT-trained aeronautical designer Konstantinos Adraktas, quit on the spot, calling the move equivalent to killing the project. He was not wrong. The cars were assembled by hand across six individual workstations, one worker per car from start to finish, meaning a door from one vehicle often would not fit another. Parts, including batteries and motors, had to be imported and cleared through customs. Cars sent back to England for final inspection had to be dismantled and reassembled. The whole operation ran from 1973 to 1976, right through the military junta years, and produced only a handful of vehicles before the factory closed permanently. Goulandris himself was a peculiar figure. Workers who spoke to documentary filmmaker Michalis Stavropoulos described a man who wore overalls, worked alongside his employees, arrived first and left last, ate no meat, and slept and woke with the sun. According to one unverified account, he once offered a worker his own villa to live in and went to stay in the worker's house instead. The Enfield E8000 was 50 years ahead of its time. Bureaucratic obstacles, an impro...