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The Fantastic Plastic Car

This article is more than 10 years old.

What’s the biggest problem with cars today? Steel, according to Gordon Murray.

Steel weighs a lot, and contributes heavily to low mileage figures, according to Murray, a noted race car designer who has headed up star programs at McLaren, Mercedes and Aston Martin. Producing the metal also requires an industrial superstructure of plants, mills and stamping machinery that boosts the embedded energy and sticker price of cars.

So what’s the answer? Cue to the T.25, a three-seater car fashioned out of lightweight composites from Gordon Murray Designs, his start up that has been funded in part by Mohr Davidow Ventures. The T.25 gets 80 miles per gallon. In a 2010 race in the U.K., it beat half of the electrics and all of the diesels in terms of mileage.

“It (weight) is by far the most powerful tool we have as a designer,” Murray said.

Weight is emerging as the cool new fuel in the auto industry. Amory Lovins, chief scientist at the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), notes that VW and BMW will release carbon fiber cars in 2013. Bright Automotive, an RMI spin-off that has received an equity injection from General Motors, is working on lightweight delivery trucks.  Alcoa wants to replace more body parts with aluminum.

“The level of interest has taken a step-function increase in the last 18 months,” Randall Scheps, director of ground transportation and consumer electronics at Alcoa, told me recently. “We will move from niche, low-volume [manufacturing] into higher volumes.”

The aluminum giant says it can even mix in titanium dioxide into aluminum car bodies to create self-cleaning cars.

And then there is Saba Motors, which wants to build an all-electric composite car. Founder Simon Saba, who stands about 5’8’’ and does not resemble an Olympic weight lifter, can hoist his prototype off the ground.

Are composites safe? Paul Wilbur, CEO at Aptera, will give you $100 if you can scratch his three-wheeled space-age composite vehicle.

The logic is straightforward. New mileage regulations will require automakers to raise the average fuel economy significantly over the next several years. The plan for the U.S., unfurled by President Obama earlier this year, will require auto makers to increase the fleet average to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.

Electric cars, micro-hybrids, new types of “opposed piston” engines will help manufacturers move toward that goal, but losing weight is cheaper, easier and quicker.

But think more broadly, Murray urges. The iStream process devised by his company to produce the T.25 revolves around injection molding and software. A factory might only need 11 tool sets that cost a total of $10 million to produce car bodies. A conventional factory might need 1,500 tools that cost $500 million euros. Retooling iStream to accommodate a new engine in the car or expanding the passenger bay mostly involves clicking a mouse.

“80 percent of the tooling is writing software,” he said.

Cheaper factories mean cheaper cars: a manufacturer could sell T.25s for $10,000 and still make "a handsome profit," he says.

A T.27, an electric version of the T.25 that has been funded in part by the U.K. government, could be sold for $23,000. Because it would weigh far less than a conventional EV, a T.27 could come with a 12.5 kilowatt hour battery, about half the size of the battery in a Nissan Leaf or Mitsubishi, and still go 100 miles on a single charge.

Murray’s move into economy cars came about because of a traffic jam. A professor originally from South Africa, Murray served as the both the technical director for the Brabham Formula One team (world champions 1981, 1983) and McLaren (world championships 1988, 1989, 1990). At McLaren in 1978, his team built the first all carbon fiber car.

“This can’t be sustainable,” he thought to himself, mired in traffic in 1993. Car makers loathe small cars because the profit margins are miniscule, but if the manufacturing costs were dramatically slashed, he reasoned, it could become an attractive business.

The first generation of iStream cars will rely on a honeycomb sandwich composite. The next generation will contain some carbon fiber to improve crash resistance on larger models. A third generation of cars will be made from thermoplastics. It might even be possible to produce cars with agricultural resin.

Murray’s team is also designing a truck made from a tubular frame and plywood panels for a charity project in Africa to allow villagers to trade and communicate with each other. It can hold 13 passengers.

But when will we see plastic cars? That’s an open question. Car manufacturers are notoriously conservative. I’ve met one group of auto inventors that spent ten years shuttling around Detroit with a technology for boosting engine performance. They never got a deal. Ultimately, they sold the patents in an auction (where they fetched millions.)

Murray, along with Bright execs and others, says that the new regulations is adding some urgency to the discussions. These technologies are also allowing non-traditional manufacturers to come into cars. Emerging Asian manufacturers also tend to be less territorial and in need of high technology.

Gordon Murray Designs is currently in discussing the possibility of licensing its know-how under royalty agreements with nine manufacturers.  A deal with one of the manufacturers to build a T.25 line could come within six months, he said.

Once an agreement is signed, a manufacturer could probably start producing cars in two to three years, he added.