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Veteran F1 designer Gordon Murray came up with the concept of a compact city car while sitting in traffic one day in the early 1990s. “Even then, before environmental concerns began to bite, I was sitting in traffic looking at single occupancy in big cars and wondering how long that could be sustainable for,” he says.
Then working for F1 team McLaren, he was involved in the team’s project to develop road cars. Later in the decade, he had the opportunity to produce a mock-up of a small city vehicle.
It’s these beginnings that inform the work of his new company, Gordon Murray Design, which is based in Surrey and employs 30 designers and engineers. The firm has developed what it claims is a new automotive manufacturing process, known as iStream, which it hopes to license to OEMs who want to develop low-carbon vehicles.
The company has also produced a working prototype of a small city car, the T.25, and is working on a version with an electric powertrain, the T.27, in a Technology Strategy Board-backed project. The electric powertrain is being developed by Zytek Automotive. Both vehicles can be produced using the iStream process, employing a mix of composites and monocoque steel tubing, rather than pressings or stampings, to cut down on investment costs.
Part of the aim was to avoid the cost of stamping steel, which Murray says means tooling costs for producing very small cars are virtually the same as for C-segment vehicles, where manufacturers can at least recover some of the value through adding extras to the car. “There had to be a different way of doing things,” he says.
The capital investment in an iStream production line, says Murray, is about 20% of that required for a conventional steel automotive platform. Further, the energy used by the line is about half that of a conventional plant. The process centres on a separate body chassis assembly process, in which pre-painted body panels are delivered to the line after the powertrain, wiring harnesses, brakes and suspension have been fitted directly to the chassis. The body panels are “married” to the completed chassis near the end of the assembly process, cutting down on paint damage.
The T.25 prototype was designed to have a very small footprint, enabling it to be parked at 90° to the kerb and with a six-metre turning circle. Its size means that in theory two could be driven side-by-side on one lane of a motorway, cutting congestion. Three cars could occupy one parallel parking space.
The prototype, which was tested on the road for the first time earlier this year, is lightweight, produces half the CO2 emissions and consumes about half the fuel of the average car. Although the vehicle weighs just 550kg, Gordon Murray Design is confident it would achieve four stars in a Euro NCAP crash test.
“We encapsulated as many solutions as possible with the design,” says Murray. He wanted to address traffic, congestion, footprint and emissions in developing a small car for the UK and Europe. “Cars are getting bigger and heavier. You often see one person in a 2½-tonne car, which is ludicrous.”
GM has given details of its own vision of urban driving with the development of the EN-V concept (“Megacity motors”), a two-person electric autonomous quadricycle that it has demonstrated at Shanghai World Expo. Murray says of the EN-V: “Vehicles like that have a niche place in the market but proper cars like the T.25 will be needed too.”
The T.27, should be ready for demonstration early next year and could go to into production in 2012. Gordon Murray Design is hoping to license the iStream process, its core intellectual property, to at least two manufacturers within the next year. Murray believes automotive companies are trying to develop vehicles that will meet today’s needs in advance of the “big stick” of government legislation.
He argues that Britain can play a central role in the development and manufacture of low-carbon vehicles. “We’ve always been good at the conceptual stuff – both in automotive and other sectors. But sometimes we let those ideas get away.
“There is a new industrial revolution taking place and the old way of doing things isn’t necessarily the best way of doing things. We would certainly like to see iStream being used to manufacture vehicles in the UK.”