A radical reimagining of the city car

CAR DESIGN:After years of working on F1 cars, Gordon Murray has turned his attention to city cars and his T25 may revolutionise the way cars are built and designed

HOPE AND DETAIL. That’s what you get when you talk to Gordon Murray. Hope that cars will still be fun to drive in 20 years time. And detail. Extreme detail. This is the man who can tell you how many parts are saved by not having external door handles on his latest design; who famously chose the pot plants in the factory; and who drew the illustrations in the owners’ manual when he was creating the McLaren F1 road car. Those who display such extreme attention to detail often can’t see the bigger picture, but few of them have Murray’s extraordinary mental agility.

We’re at the headquarters of Gordon Murray Design (GMD) an unassuming two-storey brick building on an industrial estate in Surrey, England, because he has just revealed the T25, his radical reimagining of the city car.

The story so far: GMD was founded in 2007 with Silicon Valley venture capital backing to develop the T25, but more importantly the iStream manufacturing concept.

Not only does the T25 look and function differently to any other car, but it is designed and built differently, eliminating the need for vast steel presses, spot-welding robots and paint shops, as well as cutting the space and environmental impact and capital investment needed for a new car factory by up to 80 per cent.

Murray doesn’t plan to build the T25 or anything else using the iStream theory himself. Instead, the intellectual property will be licenced to an existing carmaker or a non-car brand, who could either build the T25 or have him create another iStream design for them.

But this story has been told already. What’s new is that Murray has now shown us the T25. He would have preferred to let his first client do that; the initial plan was to have signed the first licencing deal by now and to have had the first car in production by 2012. But the global recession, while increasing buyers’ desire for small cars with radically lower running costs, also made investors nervy and decimated their funds.

“The recession cost us about a year,” Murray admits. “But I think we’re now about six to nine months from announcing the first licence. We’re getting very close with two potential clients; one is European, one isn’t. One is an existing carmaker, one isn’t. And there’s a very good chance that the T25 concept will make it into production.”

This is a city car designed by the the man who penned Formula One cars that won 15 of 16 races in a season, followed by the firm’s supercar roadgoing models.

The T25 is around 30cm shorter and 20cm narrower than a two-seat Smart car, yet seats three in an arrowhead formation with the driver ahead and in the middle, just like a F1 car.

With all three seats in place it has as much luggage space as a Smart and with the two rear seats folded Murray claims it will take six trolleys’ worth of shopping. It’s so small that two can fit alongside each other in a single motorway lane and at least three can park nose-out in a roadside parking bay. It’s so light – around 600kg – that the 660cc Mitsubishi petrol in the prototype will take it to nearly 160 km/h, making the turbo version they’d considered seem unnecessary. More importantly, it means very low emissions – around 88g/km – and running costs so low that Murray says the T25’s savings over a conventional car mean it could pay for itself within four years.

You might think that after well over a century of thinking about it, all the great leaps in how a car is conceived and packaged have been made. The T25 disproves that. The real excitement isn’t in its impressive numbers, but simply in the fact that it looks and works unlike anything else on the road.

Press a button on the keyfob and the entire front half of the canopy hinges forward around the base of the windscreen, allowing you to step into it upright with no hunching or twisting.

The view out is panoramic and the A-pillars curve inwards so you can see directly down to the kerb. The wing mirrors are huge but set high so they don’t obscure that view and they sit inside the car’s front track, so don’t make it any wider.

Murray and I even manage to fit next to each other reasonably comfortably in the rear seats. We’re atypical adults; he’s a lot taller than average and I’m a bit wider but we can stretch our legs right out and there’s masses of head and shoulder room.

So what was it like finally to sit and drive a car he’d been planning in his head since 1993?

“From an emotional point of view it was phenomenal, just to see what it felt like. The thing handles like a go-kart. Top of the list for me has always been that it has to be fun to drive. Having it feel that good was amazing. I’d have been very disappointed if it had been all pitchy and bouncy and horrid.”

That was always unlikely. Any surprises?

“The thing that I could really see in my mind’s eye was great visibility, and that’s even better than I’d hoped. It’s closest to a big motorbike in traffic. I’ve got a full race Ducati and a big touring bike and the T25 feels as nimble, but safe. You’re very aware of those passing you and more aware of distance than you are when crammed up against one side of a car that’s a foot wider and has a bonnet. I also thought this prototype would be as drummy as hell as there’s not a gramme of sound-deadening in it. But its already as quiet now as a fully-finished Smart, and will be even quieter with a production cabin, and thats a result of the iStream materials.”

SO, ISTREAM.What is it? Essentially, it's an entirely new way of constructing cars that simply sidesteps the need for the biggest, heaviest, costliest and most polluting parts of a car factory. Simple steel tubes form a frame to which the engine and suspension are mounted, with the stiffness coming from the plastic composite panels bonded to it. "This is Formula One thinking developed down to pennies," says Murray. The external panels are there to keep the rain out, and so can be made from pretty much anything – upcycled plastic bottles in the case of the T25 – and can be moulded in any shape and dyed in any colour you wish.

There doesn’t seem to be any compromises; an iStream car will be lighter and cheaper to make than a standard car, and at least as stiff and safe. iStream’s real significance however, is that it makes it financially viable to keep mass-production of cars in developed western nations.

In America, Tesla and Fisker have received low-cost federal loans of nearly a billion dollars, which they’re using to restart factories shut by the recession to build electric and plug-in hybrid cars. But won’t other governments need US-style shock-spending if they’re to kick-start production of green cars?

“The original industrial revolution was backed by government and private money. The development of green technology is like a new industrial revolution. There’s a lot going on in and to stop it disappearing, it’s going to take the kind of support youre talking about, it really is.”

Journalists might sometimes seem overly credulous of Gordon Murray; star-struck with the man and insufficiently critical of a start-up that hasn’t made a major sale yet. But it’s impossible to argue with his record or fail to be exhilarated by his capacity for unfettered thinking. And it’s hard not to lend your support to someone who tells you that your desire to drive cars isn’t criminal, has a future and offers you a car you’re going to be able to afford and know you’ll feel smarter just for owning. Like we said, hope, and detail.

Now will one of you please just build it.