Uniti One electric car available to order online from £15,100

An electrochromic sunroof, which can be adjusted from transparent to fully opaque, comes as standard, and automatically darkens when parked to keep the cabin cool. Other equipment includes rear LED lighting and LED daytime running lights, with full LED headlights an option.

The One has 155 litres of luggage space, which can be extended to 760 litres when the rear seats are folded flat.

The car can be ordered in a choice of Scandium, Graphite and Titanium colours. Customers placing their order before December 2019 will earn membership to Uniti's 'Founders Club', which includes free softwre upgrades for the life of the car.

Uniti is based in Sweden, but has a development, engineering and production hub in Norfolk.

"The UK’s approach to vehicle production, with its focus on light-weighting and innovation in advanced materials, is an ideal model for electric car production globally,” Uniti CEO Lewis Horne said.

Uniti has ambitions to become a “major player” in the British EV market over the next few years and plans to establish a London office that will ensure the necessary capital is raised to meet its tight time goals.

The announcement came at a tough time for the British car industry, with the uncertainty surrounding Brexit leading other manufacturers to look farther afield for their production facilities. Jaguar already builds the I-Pace electric SUV in Austria, and Nissan weighing up the possibility of moving production of the new Juke abroad.

Uniti has worked with several companies, including energy supplier E.ON, which is offering its customers five years' worth of free energy to charge a Uniti at home.

The brand claims that the One will produce 75% less CO2 over its lifetime - from manufacturing to disposal - than a conventional vehicle. Horne described the car’s structure as “scalable”, with two, four and five-seat variants planned for production.

Uniti aims to supply each market from within that market, using automated production centres and digital twinning technology supplied by Siemens. This would allow assembly line schematics to be shared anywhere in the world, to set up plants with enough capacity to fulfil the production demand of a particular market. The entire production line would be automated, with staff mainly focused on quality control at the end of the process. The proposed system would provide a more environmentally friendly alternative to the traditional manufacturing process, which relies heavily on transportation networks to distribute cars from a single central production facility.