A fascination with the possibility of life on Mars is the interplanetary connection that brought three entrepreneurs together to design and produce a futuristic sports car.

It sounds like a Twilight Zone tale of entrepreneurship, but in this case the fiction is close to becoming fact: the car is now being road-tested, its first production run of 350 has sold out and buyers include Hollywood actor George Clooney and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.