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Murray's T25 outsmarts the Smart

Gordon Murray’s T25 was unveiled at the Smith School’s World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment in Oxford on Monday.

In his design career Murray has penned F1 championship winning racers and the world’s greatest ever performance car for McLaren.

With his latest project Murray has been burdened by a promise that the T25 would be the best urban transport solution yet. A car to make the Smart look, well, rather silly.

Smarter than a Smart?

Dimensionally the T25 is only 2.4m bumper-to-bumper and 1.3m from one flank to the other.

Licensing mass is less than 575kg and all things considered it makes the Smart look like a badly packaged, oversized toy car.

Packaging has always been a fundamental design axiom for Murray. His F1 supercar had a central driving position and could transport three adults, something no other mid-engined supercar has ever managed. Unsurprisingly, T25 majors on the clever use of space contained within its compact dimensions. The driver occupies the front part of the cabin, with two passengers in the rear. T25’s interior can be configured in six different ways to accommodate either more passengers or luggage.

Ingeniously the car’s tidy packaging and city car dimensions ensure it can park nose-to-kerb and if need be, three T25s can occupy a single parallel paring bay.

In terms of styling the T25’s tall proportions are immediately reminiscent of the current Smart, yet the stylised nose (with its two sets of individual dual headlights) distinguishes the Murray creation from contemporary city car fare.

Accessing and debussing the T25 is accomplished via an articulated front cab section, which disengages and fold forwards, enabling the driver and passengers to get onboard in a way not dissimilar to BMW's Isetta microcar of the mid-Fifties.

A rear-wheel drive city car?

Mechanically the T25 is commensurate to Murray’s impeccable technical standards.

Despite its size all four wheels are independently suspended (wishbones and anti-roll bars up front, a V-arm and i-links at the rear) and the chassis is a tubular steel arrangement filled out with a composite floor.

Murray says the T25’s steel frame and composite floor yields an immensely strong safety cell. Considering his experience designing safety cells for his McLaren F1 race cars this can hardly be construed as simple marketing speak.

Airflow management, something Murray mastered designing for the Brabham and McLaren F1 teams, is buoyed by the T25’s flat underbody – aiding stability and efficiency.

What appeals most about Murray’s T25 design is the car’s executable drivetrain. It is not a hybrid or pure electric drive vehicle and therefore makes sense to buyers familiar with, and trusting, of traditional internal combustion technology.

Surprisingly, the T25 drives via its rear wheels (reinforcing Murray’s belief in holistic dynamics not being irreconcilable with a low-impact city car), powered by a low-friction 660cc triple producing 38kW and 57Nm.

Those output figures may be slight, yet the car’s five-speed semi-automatic transmission ensures a 0-100km/h benchmark sprint time in 16.2 seconds, top speed of 156km/h and trifling economy figures of 3.8l/100km.
 
Murray has commissioned drivetrain specialist Zytek to develop an electric drive system for the T25’s sibling, the T27. This Zytek solution will comprise a battery and transmission combined in a single, compact unit. Peak power output will be 25kW, extracted from a 12kWh lithium-ion battery pack driving the rear wheels via a single-ratio transmission.

The T25 features a comprehensive suite of driver aids and safety equipment. All four wheels have dedicated anti-lock braking and electronic stability control intervention, whilst the cabin features a front airbag for the driver – who occupies the front third of the car alone.

Many industry analysts thought Murray's vision of finishing off a stellar design career by solving the world’s urban transport problem would prove an insurmountable challenge.

So far the former Durbanite has delivered on each key date in his city car project's product development life cycle. Murray says the T25 is set to enter production in two years time – there appears no reason to doubt him.

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