Put yourself in Gordon Murray's shoes. You've designed some of the most successful Formula 1 cars of all time. You followed that up with a couple of road cars—the Light Car Company Rocket and the McLaren F1—that were hailed as genius but only built in tiny numbers. So what's next?

Rethinking the entire way cars are made, obviously. Disturbed by the trend of ever-heavier vehicles and their resource- and energy-intensive manufacturing, Murray came up with iStream, which attempts to solve all of those problems at once. After several years of trying to license the system to existing car makers, he has decided to do it himself. Gordon Murray Automobiles will start off with "a return to the design and engineering principles that have made the McLaren F1 such an icon," Murray said in a statement.

These days, most of the cars on our roads use a monocoque chassis. Most of those are usually made from steel, the stamping of which uses a lot of energy. iStream-constructed cars do it a little differently. There's a laser-cut steel frame that provides all the mounting points for the engine, suspension, and so on. But a welded steel frame isn't stiff enough on its own, so composite honeycomb-cored panels (which could be made from expensive composites or cheap stuff like fiberglass and cardboard) are bonded onto it, significantly boosting structural rigidity.

The resulting vehicles are both light and strong, and because the assembly process is simple, the factory can be a lot smaller and cheaper than a normal car factory. The snag has always been getting an existing OEM to bite. After all, there's much less incentive to spend money on a clever new way of doing things when you already have hundreds of millions of dollars invested in making cars the way everyone else does. Back in 2015, Yamaha's Sport Ride concept used iStream, but as far as we know, nothing has come of it.

But for new entrants—or reborn ones like Britain's TVR—taking a chance on iStream can be more compelling, particularly since it comes with the cachet of Murray's name. The news that Murray will start building his own cars should put a smile on the face of every enthusiast out there. I just hope they'll be road-legal here in the US, or I might have to consider moving back to the UK.