Vehicle development and prototyping specialist Gordon Murray Design today showed for the first time its T.25 City Car during the Smith School's World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University. Validating a low-carbon approach to transportation, the T.25 claims a major breakthrough in city car design in the areas of weight, footprint, safety, usability and efficiency.
Gordon Murray Design's pioneering vehicle packaging and lightweight design offers solutions to multiple urban mobility problems, such as congestion and parking concerns, while at the same time its iStream manufacturing process reduces full lifecycle CO2 damage and increases production efficiencies.
"Our transportation sector is hugely dependent on fossil fuels and we need to de-fossilise our economy as quickly as possible," said Sir David King, Founding Director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. "The T.25 and iStream manufacturing processes are clear examples of what's possible in low-carbon transportation."
The T.25 car program can support a variety of power trains and fuels, and its first markets are likely to be in Europe and Asia.
"The iStream process used to produce the T.25 is a complete re-think on high-volume materials, as well as the manufacturing process and offers a significant reduction in CO2 emissions over the lifecycle of the vehicles produced using it, compared with conventional ones," said CEO Gordon Murray. "The simplified assembly process means that an assembly plant can be designed to be 20 per cent of the size of a conventional factory. This could reduce capital investment in the assembly plant by approximately 80 per cent."
