May 30 (Bloomberg) --Gordon Murray’s quest to reinvent
automaking started in a traffic jam.
Murray, the legendary former designer of Formula One race
cars, was driving to work in the
London suburbs in 1993 when he
hit gridlock. Surrounded by gas-guzzling sedans, he vowed to
someday make small, efficient vehicles that would ease
congestion and become stylish objects of desire, Bloomberg
Markets magazine reports in its July issue.
On a misty March morning 19 years later, he swings open a
metal door in a gymnasium-sized workshop south of London.
“There they are,” Murray, 65, says with a fatherly smile.
Murray’s cube-shaped city cars, parked in the middle of the
floor, look like oversize toys: At 8 feet (2.4 meters) in
length, they are 11 inches shorter than
Daimler AG’s (DAI) Smart
microcar. Sporting chiseled side panels that swoosh back from
the front wheels like air currents, they exude quickness and
agility.
The matte-black T.25, with a 51-horsepower, three-cylinder
engine, goes 100 miles (160 kilometers) per hour. It gets 96
miles to the U.K. gallon (1.2 U.S. gallons) compared with 72 mpg
for the Smart Pulse coupe in Europe. The cobalt-blue T.27,
propelled by a lithium-ion battery and a 25-kilowatt electric
motor, can go 100 miles on about $1.06 of power.
Murray built these prototypes in an audacious bid to
overturn the way automobiles have been designed, assembled and
sold for the past 100 years.
As rising oil prices and tightening carbon emission rules
push manufacturers to make smaller cars, they are saddled with
what Murray calls an outdated and costly system of turning
sheets of steel into vehicles.
Formula One Technology
Automakers (BEAUTOS) have long lost money making small cars because
they have to invest just as much capital in the metalwork for a
cheap compact as they do for a luxury sedan, says
Eric Noble,
president of The Car Lab, an Orange, California-based consulting
firm.
“Essentially, we’ve been making motorcars the same way
since the Model T, and that model is breaking down,” says
Murray, whose swept-back mane of graying hair suggests he’s just
emerged from a wind tunnel. “I want to bring Formula One
technology to the everyday motorist, with all its advantages.”
Murray, who shuns computers and draws his designs by hand,
makes his autos out of a lightweight composite material similar
to carbon fiber used in race cars.
That allows him to jettison the robots and machinery that
stamp and weld about 300 pieces of metal together in a typical
car body. While automakers such as
Ford Motor Co. (F) are developing
models that use more lightweight materials and less steel,
Murray wants manufacturers to make all of their cars with as
little metal as possible.
Plastic Bottles
The designer’s breakthrough was in finding a way to make a
city car in two primary steps instead of the standard five,
Noble says. His iStream system forms a chassis out of composite
and then installs components and attaches body panels made from
recycled plastic bottles.
Three steps -- stamping the steel frame, welding the body
together and rustproofing -- are eliminated. A manufacturer
could build an iStream plant to make 100,000 cars annually for
85 percent less capital than a conventional one, Murray says.
Since an iStream factory would be two-thirds smaller, it would
consume about 60 percent less energy.
He says the process has been so simplified that retailers
such as
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) or electronics giants such as
Apple
Inc. (AAPL) could use it to jump into carmaking.
While Murray’s vision may sound quixotic, he has proven
himself one of the most creative minds in the history of Formula
One, the world’s premier grand prix circuit.
Jay Leno
A cerebral man with a taste for loud floral shirts and
early Bob Dylan, Murray introduced composites and other speed-
enhancing innovations to racing in the 1970s and 1980s. Hall of
Fame drivers Ayrton Senna, Nelson Piquet and Alain Prost won a
total of five Formula One championships in his cars.
In the 1990s, Murray created the street-legal F1 for
McLaren Group Ltd., a British Formula One team and supercar
manufacturer. The lithe, $1 million coupe, which hit a top speed
of 241 miles per hour in a 1998 test, has been hailed as the
finest high-performance automobile ever made.
“It’s a pure, singular vision of what a car should be,”
says talk show host Jay Leno, who has more than 100 rare
vehicles, including an F1.
Murray has worshipped automobiles ever since he tinkered
with engine blocks in his garage as a kid growing up in Durban,
South Africa. His father, Bill, raced motorcycles and worked as
a mechanic in a local
Peugeot (UG) dealership. Young Gordon built his
own race car from assorted parts when he was just 20 and drove
it to victory in several races.
George Harrison
After taking courses in mechanical engineering at Natal
Technical College, he decamped for England in 1969 and
eventually landed a junior designer’s job at Brabham, a British
Formula One racing team. With little money, he slept on the
floor of a London flat and worked 14-hour days.
In 1972, Brabham owner and future Formula One chieftain
Bernie Ecclestone surprised rival racing executives by anointing
the hungry 26-year-old his chief designer.
A huge rock-and-roll fan, Murray grew his hair long and
wore Sex Pistols T-shirts at the track. He became close friends
with George Harrison after meeting the late Beatles guitarist
and race fan on a
Concorde (AF) flight to Brazil in 1976. Years
later, Murray inlaid images of Indian elephants in the dashboard
of the McLaren F1 he designed for Harrison in a nod to the rock
star’s spiritual beliefs.
Murray’s freewheeling sensibility was apparent in his car
designs. In 1979, he was the first engineer to throw out
aluminum and construct a chassis entirely of carbon fiber.
Aerodynamic Effect
And in 1981, he designed a hydro-pneumatic suspension that
let his race car drop to within 1 centimeter of the track at
high speed to amplify downforce, which helps
tires grip the road
and corner faster. Rival teams protested that the system
violated a ban on driver-operated devices to maximize this
aerodynamic effect.
Murray countered that physics lowered the car, and Formula
One officials agreed. Brabham’s Piquet went on to win the World
Drivers’ Championship that year, a first for a Murray-designed
car.
“Rather than obey the rule, Murray got around it,” says
Nigel Cross, professor emeritus of design studies at The Open
University in Milton Keynes, England.
Iconic Urban Vehicle
By the mid-1990s, Murray had left Formula One and begun
work on the McLaren F1 as well as on more-unusual projects.
Intent on building his own drive-in movie theater, Murray
reinforced a barn on his estate with steel girders and then
dismantled a pink 1959
Cadillac (GM) convertible. In the barn’s loft,
he reassembled the classic car without its engine and
suspension.
Under a ceiling strewn with starlike lights, he and his
friends watch movies on a 9-foot-wide screen from the Caddy’s
bench seats. The topper: He re-created the Formica-and-chrome
interior of the diner in American Graffiti, the 1973 hot-rod
movie, next to the car.
“I just adore Americana,” he says with a shrug.
Back at the office, Murray was sketching a more practical
venture: a city car. He was inspired by the Fiat 500 and the
Mini Cooper, two modish compacts from the 1960s. After McLaren
declined to produce Murray’s new machine, he recruited 27 of its
engineers and other employees and founded his own firm in 2004.
“I wanted to create the next iconic European urban
vehicle,” Murray says. “But then I discovered you couldn’t make
any money making small cars.” So he set out to reinvent auto
assembly to cut production costs.
Light as Cardboard
Inside the workshop of Gordon Murray Design Ltd. in
Shalford, England, a few engineers are working on a prototype
for a 3.5-ton composite truck for use in Africa. A mock-up of
the T.25’s interior carved out of wood sits on one side of the
floor. Nearby, a glistening engine rests on a rack like a piece
of modern art.
Amid the whir of power tools, Murray picks up a piece of
composite -- a black square of honeycombed paper and
polycarbonate plastic sandwiched between two skins made of
tightly woven glass strands. This 2-centimeter-thick composite
feels as light as cardboard but as hard as steel. And it’s 25
times cheaper than carbon fiber.
Amused Looks
Murray used an industrial press to mold several pieces of
this composite and bond them to a tubular steel frame. This
structure forms a hip-high solid chassis that supports the
engine, interior and other components. At 1,212 pounds (550
kilograms), the T.25 is less than half the weight of
Bayerische
Motoren Werke AG (BMW)’s Mini Cooper.
The T.27, which features a powertrain by U.K.-based Zytek
Automotive Ltd., met the European Union’s car safety
requirements in crash tests conducted last year by Mira Ltd., a
firm based in Warwickshire, England.
As he did in the F1, Murray placed the driver in the center
of the bubblelike cabin, and passenger seats are slotted back on
both sides. Instead of side doors, the car’s top opens like a
clamshell to allow entry.
On a May afternoon, Kevin Doyle, Murray’s development
manager, draws amused looks from pedestrians as he punches the
T.25 through heavy traffic in London’s Kensington neighborhood.
Doyle is about to zoom through an opening between a bus and the
curb when a Mercedes-Benz lumbers in front of the T.25.
“I could have made it through that space, but he’s too
big,” Doyle chuckles. In their current forms, the T.25 would
retail in Europe for 8,678 euros ($11,000) and the electric car
for 19,723 euros.
Deep Spending
Murray has yet to see commercial versions of his handiwork
zipping around city streets. Rather than produce cars himself,
he plans to license iStream to companies in return for an
upfront fee and a percentage of the sale of every unit that
rolls off the line.
He’s avoided the deep spending that’s bedeviled other
startups that are making their own vehicles.
Palo Alto,
California-based
Tesla Motors Inc. (TSLA), which produces a plug-in
sports car, lost $254 million on $204 million in sales last
year.
Murray’s firm, which collects revenue from auto-design
consulting, has spent about 30 million pounds ($51 million)
since 2007. It raised $12 million from Mohr Davidow Ventures and
4.5 million pounds from the Technology Strategy Board, a U.K.
government-backed research group, to help develop the
prototypes.
Huge Changes
While Murray has conducted exploratory discussions with 10
car companies and five other businesses, he had yet to close a
production deal as of mid-May.
“It would have been more expedient to build cars, but
Gordon had a business model that was more capital efficient,”
says Jon Feiber, a general partner at Mohr Davidow in Menlo
Park, California. “We’ll see if this was the correct path to
build a valuable company.”
Automakers will probably be loath to embrace Murray’s
vision as they struggle to reap returns from their existing
plants, says
Maryann Keller, a
Stamford, Connecticut-based
independent industry consultant.
“Many automakers are on their financial knees right now, so
they can’t afford to transition to something different that will
involve huge changes to their capital investments,” Keller says.
New Manufacturing Setup
Murray says car companies may not have a choice as
regulators clamp down on emissions. By 2015, manufacturers in
Europe must ensure that 100 percent of their new cars meet new
greenhouse gas emission caps or the EU will fine them for every
gram of excess carbon.
The U.S. is on course to impose new carbon dioxide
standards that will effectively double the average fuel economy
target to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.
“There are limits to what the internal combustion engine
can do, and we are close to that limit, so the next part of this
process has to be lightweight materials,” says David King, the
director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment
at the University of Oxford. “What is completely innovative
about Gordon’s work is effectively putting these materials
together with enormous financial benefits. He’s developed a
completely new manufacturing setup.”
With iStream, Murray has designed a way for automakers to
profitably make unique cars suited for a crowded, energy-starved
world. And consumers are warming to small cars again. India’s
Tata Motors Ltd. (TTMT) sold 74,527 Nano microcars in the 12 months
that ended on March 31, 6 percent more than the prior year. And
after a rocky introduction, Turin, Italy-based
Fiat SpA (F) in April
recorded its second straight month of record sales gains in the
U.S. for its revamped 500.
Monster Industry
Should automakers pass on his brainchild, Murray is betting
there are other players willing to try and leapfrog the status
quo.
“We’re taking on this monster industry, but we know it’s
going to work,” says Murray, standing in front of a mural
depicting his victorious Formula One cars. “I love the idea of
being a giant killer.”
Editors: Vince Bielski, Michael Serrill
To contact the reporter on this story:
Edward Robinson in
San Francisco at
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Laura Colby in
New York at
lcolby@bloomberg.net
