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Formula one car designer Gordon Murray with the prototype of a new fuel-efficient T25 car
Formula One car designer Gordon Murray with the prototype of a new light-weight fuel-efficient T25. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian
Formula One car designer Gordon Murray with the prototype of a new light-weight fuel-efficient T25. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian

McLaren F1 design team to roll out green car

This article is more than 13 years old
Lightweight and with an expected pricetag of £6,000, will the fuel-efficient T25 pass the Jeremy Clarkson test?

In the boom years of the 1990s, the workshop of Gordon Murray produced the 240mph McLaren F1, one of the fastest and most coveted road cars in the world. This month, the same design team will unveil the next vehicle to roll off the Murray production line, but using a lot less fuel as it does so.

While the drivers of the 106 F1 supercars that were built might struggle to travel more than a dozen miles on a gallon of petrol, the new car, dubbed the T25, can manage almost a hundred – significantly better than the most fuel-efficient cars on the market today.

Smaller than a Smart car, the new T25 is Murray's solution to city streets choked with traffic that belch out huge amounts of carbon dioxide. Lightweight and with an expected pricetag of £6,000, he hopes for an initial take up of 100,000 of the cars across Britain and mainland Europe.

Murray, former technical director for the McLaren Formula One racing team, said: "We are not too far from regulations in an urban environment that will mean you can't drive a car above a certain size and weight in a city." Japanese cities have already introduced such laws to control pollution and congestion, he said. "Companies are making bigger and heavier cars and filling them with more and more heavy equipment and rubbish. This has to change."

Murray admitted that he helped to contribute to the "culture problem" that views big, loud and fast cars as status symbols, but said success with his new green design would trump his previous work. "If you can take a significant amount of weight out of a car then that is the equivalent of 30 years of improvements to the internal combustion engine." The T25 weighs just 600kg, he said, about half that of a typical small hatchback, and can comfortably reach 80mph and above. A full tank of petrol will take it 450 miles.

Murray will unveil the T25 at a conference on low-carbon transport at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment in Oxford later this month. Today, he gave the Guardian a sneak preview at his workshop in Guildford, Surrey.

The driver's seat is in the middle, with two passenger seats placed behind: a nod, Murray says, to both Formula One cars and the cockpit of a jet fighter. There are no doors; the front section including the windscreen tips forward to allow driver and passengers to clamber in and out. About 200 people, including a mother and baby, have already done so as part of its development.

Strictly speaking, Murray's team is not aiming to sell the T25 car itself, but rather license to others the "iStream" manufacturing process it has devised to make it. Rather than using conventional pressed and welded steel plates, the firm's technique bonds ultra-strong composite sheets to a steel tube frame. Recycled plastic bottles make cheap and easy to replace bodywork panels. "This is Formula One technology for pennies," he said.

Murray says the T25 and others to follow, including an electric version, offer a green solution to our growing transport problem. But will they catch on, and will they pass the Jeremy Clarkson test? The Top Gear presenter is a vocal critic of green cars such as the G-Wiz. "Jeremy Clarkson is an entertainer, not a car person," Murray said. "We are car people."

The T25 would be ideal for people who need a city car for more than brief commutes, he said.

It would take another two years to construct a factory and complete tests before the cars could be sold, Murray said.

He is talking to prospective manufacturers across the world, but is keen for the project to remain based in Britain, perhaps owned by a consortium of groups from different sectors. Conventional car manufacturers are unlikely buyers, he said. "This is just too disruptive for them. It is a totally different way of making a car." That could open the door to unlikely customers. "It could be that the car company of the future is a supermarket," he said. "Why not? They have the finance and they could make and sell cars."

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