Gordon Murray's T.27: the future of electric urban cars?
By: Roger Stansfield, Tuesday, July 19, 2011, AutomotiveWorld.com
Gordon Murray's 20-year dream of starting a revolution in the design and manufacture of the cars people drive in cities has come another step closer to fruition with the unveiling of a near-production-ready version of his T.27 electric three-seater.
The T.27 complements the near-identical combustion-engined T.25 revealed exactly a year ago. Both have been designed to be built around a tubular steel and composite chassis and body structure using Murray's patented iStream manufacturing process. This requires only 20% of the space and 15% of the set-up costs of a factory producing conventional pressed-steel panels that need to be welded together and painted.
On the face of it, it all this seems an unlikely venture for a man who was one of the most creative forces in Formula 1 design in the 1980s. As Technical Director of Brabham and then McLaren, Murray guided Nelson Piquet, Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost to a total of five drivers' championships between 1981 and 1990, and then went on to design the McLaren F1, which is still regarded by many people as the greatest supercar of all time.
Yet for almost 20 years he has been obsessed with the belief that road cars, and especially those driven in cities, are unnecessarily large, heavy and inefficient, and since 2007 his company, Gordon Murray Design (GMD), based at Shalford in Surrey, UK, has been designing concepts and production systems that will change all that. His small team includes a large number of ex-McLaren personnel.
The T.25 and T.27 are the most visible evidence of eight related designs that GMD has so far completed, and there are more in the pipeline. The T.27, fractionally the larger of the two that have so far been made real, is just 2.5 metres long and a mere 1.3 metres wide. That allows two to be driven side by side in a single lane and three to be parked end-on in a roadside bay that would normally accommodate one conventional car. Even a two-seater smart looks big by comparison.
Within that 2.5 metre-long vehicle, three adults can fit comfortably, and there's even room for some luggage. The driver sits centrally, with the two passengers further back and to the sides - the layout Murray used in the McLaren F1. There are no conventional doors: to let people in, the whole front half of the cabin tips forward.
The T.27 took just 17 months to go from clean sheet of paper to first running prototype, including the development of a brand new electric powertrain by the British engineering company, Zytek Automotive. "The powertrain is finished, but we have a lot more work to do to industrialise it," says Murray.
That powertrain is based on a 25kW electric motor powered by a 12kWh lithium-ion battery pack that weighs just 129kg and can be recharged to 80% of capacity in four-and-a-half hours. Murray says that in testing, the T.27 has regularly been covering 130 miles (210km) on a full charge, at speeds of up to 65mph (105kph).
The T.25 has already proved its efficiency, winning the Most Economic Small Passenger ICE and Most Economic and Environment Friendly Small Passenger ICE categories in the UK's inaugural Brighton-to-London Future Car Challenge last November, and Murray expects the T.27 to clean up just as emphatically in the electric-car classes in the repeat event later this year.
The T.27 was created at a cost of £9.1m (US$14.65), half of which came from the government-funded Technology Strategy Board (TSB). The next stage is to find somebody to begin making it: exploitation of programmes is a key requirement when accepting TSB backing, but Murray has no plans to become a car manufacturer himself. Instead, GMD will license production to outsiders - either established vehicle manufacturers or new start-up companies.
"This is the start of a new era in manufacturing," says Ian Gray, the Chief Executive of the TSB. "When I started at the TSB I was told that the automotive sector was a sunset industry, but what I'm beginning to realise is that it's very much a sunrise industry. There is a great wave of low-carbon technology going on. Our job is to see the realisation of some of the technology being created in the UK."
"Our core business is intellectual property," says Murray. "The plan is to license iStream so that people can build whatever cars they want. It's a totally flexible system. You could use it to make a vehicle for 13 people, a single-seater city car or even a four-seater hatchback - iStream doesn't care."
"We are currently talking to three manufacturers about production. One is a non-OEM here in the UK, one is an OEM in Europe and the other is a non-OEM a long way away. Our discussions in the UK are a fair way off coming to anything, but in the far-off country we are closer to an agreement, and we have been talking to the European manufacturer for 18 months. I am hoping we might be able to say something towards the end of this year." Murray believes that without the banking collapse at the end of 2008, cars would already be on the road.
"When I left Formula 1 and did Le Mans (which the McLaren F1 won on its debut in 1995), I realised that Le Mans was a lot harder than F1. Then when I started forming a road car company, I realised that was a lot harder than both," says Murray.
If the prime motivation was to develop a car that requires less energy to make, use and ultimately recycle, the starting point was the removal of unnecessary weight, an obsession of Murray's going back to his Formula 1 days. The heavier the car, the bigger the powertrain it needs and the more energy it uses. Weight also adds significantly to cost.
"For every kilo I can take out of the chassis I can save €23 (US$32) in lithium-ion on the batteries," says Murray. "The T.27 will sell for half the price of the next-cheapest electric vehicle - about £15,000 (US$24,000)." That is the approximate price before any government subsidy.
The vehicle's welded and bonded tube-and-sheet chassis and composite body are space-efficient, light and strong. Even with the weight of its batteries, the T.27 comes in at 680kg, only 100kg more than the T.25 powered by a three-cylinder 660cc Mitsubishi petrol engine.
"Nowadays people are able to quantify what weight costs, so weight-saving drives everything that we do," says Murray, "but that makes it a struggle not to compromise safety, and a struggle not to spend more money than we need to. Aluminium is expensive to make, use and recycle, and carbonfibre is a multiple of that, so we had to find a different way."
Two crash tests have already been successfully completed, both using a T.27. Murray decided to use the T.27 for the tests because, with its electric powertrain and greater weight than the ICE-powered T.25, it is harder to get a good result with the T.27. It came through the 56kph front offset crash test and the 50kph side impact with a deformable barrier with barely any cabin intrusion, leaving Murray confident of a four-star rating if and when it goes through the entire Euro-NCAP procedure.
Published on Tuesday, July 19, 2011
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