Gordon Murray’s 350MPG EV sweeps the board and steals our hearts

The T.27 competed against greater than 65 entries including the newest technology from 11 major car manufacturers. The lightweight city car won ‘Most Energy Efficient Small Car (Prototype)’, ‘Best Overall Pure Electric Vehicle’ and ‘Best Overall Entry – RAC Future Car Challenge Winner’.

The T.27 covered the 57.13 miles from Brighton to London carrying 2 occupants, contained in the allocated time using lower than 64 pence worth of energy – Resembling 350 MPG (0.81 litres / 100 km) and only 37 gm CO2 / km. On a whole charge, taking only 4 hours, the T.27 can do greater than 100 miles.

Gordon Murray Design chose the RAC Future Car Challenge to be the T.27′s public running debut after the car’s launch in July this year as “The World’s Gold standard Electric Car”. The RAC Future Car Challenge is one of the most relevant event on the earth to illustrate new automotive green technology because it is administered in real world traffic conditions producing easy to grasp results and bypassing all of the advertising hype.

The T.27 design and development programme was a £9 million project, made possible through a £4.5 million investment from the govt-backed Technology Strategy Board. Consortium partners include Zytek Automotive Limited, Vocis and Michelin. Gordon Murray Design is currently engaged with 3 possible manufacturers for the town car, one in every of that’s within the UK.

The T.27 is the most recent vehicle to exploit Gordon Murray Design’s innovative iStream® manufacturing process, which aims to noticeably reduce lifecycle impacts and enable cheap, efficient manufacture throughout the UK. The T.27 sets new standards in weight, footprint, small car dynamics, safety, packaging and efficiency whilst addressing full lifecycle CO2 emissions, congestion, parking and coffee cost motoring.

iStream® – the producing technology on which the T.27 relies – is Formula One technology for the typical motorist, delivering benefits from ‘light-weighting’ in conjunction with high levels of safety. Gordon Murray Design completed a crash test programme as a part of the T.27 project which included the 40% offset frontal crash test, the side impact test and the side impact pole test, achieving results which set new standards in small car safety. The corporate has also recently completed a structural durability test which showed the T.27′s iStream® chassis to be as much as 60 times tougher than a normal steel structure.

Professor Gordon Murray, CEO & Technical Director of Gordon Murray Design said:

“This win represents a tremendous breakthrough in our race to minimize automotive energy consumption and emissions. This year’s success together with last year’s win with our petrol powered T.25, awarded ‘Most Economic Small Passenger ICE Vehicle’ and ‘Most Economic and Efficient Small Passenger ICE Vehicle’, proves absolutely that lightweight is our strongest tool for solving our energy problems. Our team is proud to have worked with the Technology Strategy Board and our other partners in this exciting programme and we glance forward to working with a producing partner to make the T.27 with its low running costs available to the motoring public”

David Bott, Director of Innovation Programmes on the Technology Strategy Board, said:

“Gordon Murray Design and their partners deserve every congratulation. The T.27 is a good example of creative thinking, sustainable vehicle design, clever engineering and innovative manufacturing coming together to deliver an incredibly efficient electric vehicle. We’re delighted to were serious about this sort of dynamic technological innovation.”

Neil Heslington, Managing Director of Zytek Automotive Limited, said:

“It was fantastic to peer the T.27 scoop the pinnacle prize today, especially knowing the labor and innovative effort that the combined teams of Zytek and Gordon Murray Design have installed, the remarkable performance from the mix of ultra-lightweight drivetrain and vehicle systems show us the future of low energy transport.”