Has Gordon Murray fallen? The engineer behind what was once the world’s fastest production car now builds fancy carts for mall cops. A cursory glance at the Shell concept car, a three-cylinder microcar bearing Murray’s logo, could leave the impression of a once famous athlete reduced to living on the streets. After all, Murray made the McLaren F1! What on earth could he want with this?
Ah, but he has been devising “urban mobility solutions” since 2010, seeing a chance to apply his technical expertise to problems that affect the lives of millions of people globally rather than just a few wealthy folks who like to go fast. The canopy of this latest effort cracks open like a pistachio, exposing a carbon-fiber structure that reveals Murray’s underlying genius. This concept employs a lightweight, simplified method of car construction that could become the “biggest revolution in high-volume automotive manufacture since the Model T,” claims the website for Gordon Murray Design. Coming from the man who brought us the world’s first roadgoing carbon-fiber monocoque and set the standard for all hypercars to come, it’s believable. He is just applying similar ideas to something nearly eight inches shorter than a Smart Fortwo.
At 98.4 inches long and 53.1 inches wide, the Shell concept car is claimed to weigh 1210 pounds. An evolution of Murray’s earlier T.25 and T.27 prototypes, this concept represents his template for what he calls iStream, a pared-down assembly process that boasts high strength and safety using the minimum amount of individual parts and tooling. It’s a funny-looking creature with cross-eyed headlights, graced only by polished black 13-inch wheels and Shell’s red-and-gold livery.
A thin-walled tubular steel frame surrounds a composite tub made from recycled carbon fiber and a honeycomb structure made from cardboard. The firewall, cargo shelf, and a portion of the hatch are 3D-printed plastic. The body panels are fiberglass-reinforced plastic. Technically, there are doors that swing up, though they’re conjoined with the roof and windshield, and there’s a central driving position with an undeniably F1-inspired seatback. Those sloped cutouts in the side windows also look to be patterned after the McLaren F1.
Shell shows up for the oil, an experimental OW-12 synthetic sloshing inside this car’s 660-cc Mitsubishi kei engine (the Japan-market gasoline version of the car, the Mitsubishi i, is sold here only as the electric i-MiEV). Such a thin viscosity would tear apart a normal engine. Shell went on a friction-hunting mission, replacing the pistons and valve springs and using diamond-like carbon (DLC), a super hard, smooth, and durable coating used in Formula 1. Shell claims a 30 percent reduction in friction and a 5 percent increase in fuel economy using its oil in this engine. At a steady 45 mph, the concept is claimed to get 107 mpg.
Unlike our highway test, where we run cars at 75 mph for 200 miles on a public highway, we had only a few thousand square feet of concrete to drive on inside Detroit’s Cobo Center. We made a dozen or so laps—in both directions–and may have hit 15 mph, certainly well short of any encounter with the 90-mph speed governor. The unassisted steering doesn’t self-center but feels direct, light, and full of surface texture. Acceleration happens, sometimes without full intention, since the tiny pedals are narrowly spaced and practically invisible under the dash.
As in any McLaren, a button enables manual shifting and, via steering-wheel paddles, we engaged second with the slightest clunk from the sequential five-speed gearbox. Shell representatives began to take notice when, with our photographer and their engineer pressed against the windows, we whipped through a makeshift skidpad. The engine’s 43 horsepower and 47 lb-ft of torque were not enough to overcome the 145 mm-width tires or the liability waiver we’d signed. The driver’s seat puts your face mere inches from the curviest, most distorted portion of the windshield. The combination of impaired vision with fuel odors trapped within an unventilated convention center made our 10-minute drive feel like a long trip. At this stage, it is not the sort of microcar you’d take through Manhattan.
But as one-off prototypes go, Shell and Gordon Murray aren’t too concerned about how this little runt drives. They’re looking at how the internal-combustion engine will adapt for 2050, by which time they project global energy usage will have doubled over year 2000 figures and there will be two billion vehicles worldwide, twice as many as there are now, according to Shell.
Despite looming bureaucratic demands for electrification, the company expects that automakers will be selling gasoline-powered vehicles for many more decades. To make them more efficient, safer, lighter, and cheaper to produce is everyone’s endgame, no matter the price point. Sure, we’d all like Murray to go back and build another F1. But if the Shell car technologies pan out, he’ll have put smiles on millions of faces instead of a few hundred. (Disclosure: Shell is the official fuel sponsor for Car and Driver.)
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