Close competition for clean city cars

A small, sustainable car – and another one – hit the road  

A lauded British race car designer and a UK-based car company are touting their design for a sustainable urban car which could revolutionise motor manufacturing. Using efficient materials, Gordon Murray Design and Zytek Automotive will produce a petite vehicle that takes up a fraction of a normal parking space.

Sounds familiar? It should. In June 2009, UK-based RiverSimple unveiled a similar concept, the Mk 1 (see 'Hydrogen city car hits 300mpg and 30g/km CO2', GF73). It’s a low weight, two-seater prototype city car, powered by hydrogen fuel cells and made from carbon composite materials.

Just a few months down the line, the Murray-Zytek partnership has taken the wraps off the T.27 – a low weight, three-seater, electric prototype city car. “Smaller than a Smart,” they claim, “but with more interior space.”

Both RiverSimple and Gordon Murray emphasised their efforts to reduce the carbon embedded in auto manufacturing, and to produce a low impact vehicle suitable to city dwellers. But here, the twin concepts begin to differ.

RiverSimple sees city transport as an excellent candidate for a product service approach. Drivers would lease the Mk 1, giving the car a longer, more productive lifetime, and affording RiverSimple a steady income stream not based on continuous mass sales.

Gordon Murray and Zytek, on the other hand, want to streamline manufacturing, making car factories around a fifth the conventional size, and then lease the T.27 technology for local mass production.

If investment is an indication of the concept’s marketplace success, Gordon Murray Design and Zytek Automotive are well-placed. They have received £4.5 million from the Technology Strategy Board to develop four prototypes over a 16-month period. Gordon Murray will supply the manufacturing process, dubbed iStream, and the chassis design, while Zytek contributes its electric drive train technology.

But will the cars become commonplace? According to Forum for the Future’s Rupert Fausset, car owners aren’t yet convinced that alternative vehicles meet their transport, let alone aspirational, needs. It may take a mainstream electric version like the forthcoming Nissan Leaf to create an alternative city car category. – April Streeter

1 February 2010

April Streeter