Smaller than a Mini but seats four and goes like a bomb: Is the T25 the car of the future?



Under this silver wrapping is a revolutionary new car. It's smaller than a Mini but the British inventor says it seats four in style, goes like a bomb and does 80mpg. Pure hype - or a glimpse of the future?



Your car - handsome and fast though it may be - is a dinosaur. Under those sleek lines - and the veneer of electronic, sat-navved and airbagged sophistication - it is bloated, heavy and hungry.



It is essentially a machine with Victorian origins, made in the same lumbering, expensive and labour-intensive way that cars have been made for decades. Vastly overweight, ludicrously overpowered, styled by marketing men rather than engineers, your car is, increasingly, more expensive burden than boon.



And, like a prehistoric lizard ripe for extinction, it is poised to be superseded by something smaller, lighter and more efficient.



Seeking a place in motoring history: The T25 lines up with the iconic Fiat 500 and original Mini

Just about everyone - even those who, like me, love these baroque machines - is starting to realise that the automobile, the invention which defined the 20th century, is in serious trouble.



Car companies are on the verge of bankruptcy and begging governments for taxpayers' cash to prop them up.



The roads are full and there is nowhere to park. Motorists are pilloried and persecuted, spied upon by cameras, clamped and towed, milked by councils and governments all over the world as a cash cow.



Fuel prices wobble but, in the long term, the only way is up.



And to cap it all, the freedom to drive is now portrayed as the freedom to kill polar bears and to destroy our planet. The automobile, now into its second century, needs to evolve - and fast - to stand a chance of surviving into its third.



Many people claim to have invented the car of the future. Billions are being spent. You will have seen some of the results already: hybrid cars and those funny little electric things, cars that run on biofuels, hydrogen fuel-cell cars, cars that promise to squeeze every inch out of every last drop of precious fuel.



On the fringes, madmen in sheds cook up their recipes to keep us on the move: wooden cars, cars which supposedly run on fresh air, water or chip fat. You can buy a Lotus which runs on mobile phone batteries - 6,000 of them. (Trouble is, it costs more than a Porsche.)



What is needed is something extraordinarily cheap, easy to make, small, practical, clean, good to drive and, above all, desirable. In other words, the Holy Grail of 21st-century motoring.



Gordon Murray thinks he has found it.

Professor Murray is not a madman in a shed, nor fodder for Dragons' Den. He is, perhaps, the most innovative and successful automotive engineer in Britain - perhaps in the world - with a 30-year-plus track record of building some of the most successful four-wheeled machines on the planet.

Too good to be true? The T25 could transform the motoring world



Lately, shadowy details have been emerging in the motoring press of an extraordinary new car, a machine codenamed T25 which, if real, will revolutionise motoring.

Murray is being vague, for now. He has lawyers and patents to worry about. Give too much of the game away and he could lose lots of money.



But, in an exclusive interview with the Mail, Murray paints a verbal sketch of an extraordinary machine, a car shorter and narrower than an old Mini and yet which can seat four adults in comfort.



The T25 is not some nebulous 'car of the future'. It does not fly, nor does it run on rocket fuel, chip fat or even electricity. It has four wheels, a conventional (but incredibly small) engine, somewhere to sit and somewhere to put your shopping.

It will not be a pretend car like those ghastly electric buggies, nor will it require Star Trek technology under the bonnet - just a wholly new approach to automotive engineering.



The T25 will not do 200mph, but it will carry four adults in comfort and safety, use tried-and-tested technology, and will, its maker insists, be cheap enough for everyone and fun to boot.



This is a car which will cost less than £5,600 to buy (including taxes), comfortably better 80 or even 100mpg, can be parked nose-in to the kerb, three-abreast in a standard parking space, is light enough to be picked up by four strong men, and which costs 80 per cent less to make than a car today.



Two of these cars could travel side-by-side in a single motorway lane, and what's more, the T25 will be no eco-warrior's hairshirt of a vehicle (like those ghastly little electric buggies) but a safe, desirable, practical, fast and funky piece of machinery which will look as sexy as the Minis and E-Types of old.



In fact, it all sounds rather too good to be true.



Surely if all this were possible, someone would have done it by now?



To answer this question, we need to know first how seriously we can take Professor Gordon Murray.



Well, in the 1970s he designed a series of groundbreaking (and track record- breaking) Formula One cars. He has been technical director of the McLaren team and his cars have won numerous constructors' and drivers' championships.



Then, in 1993, he designed the most radical sports car ever seen - the McLaren F1.



Capable of 243mph, this three-seater lightweight marvel was at least a decade ahead of its time and F1s are now about the most sought-after second-hand supercars there are.



So when Gordon Murray says we need to scrap everything we know about cars - ordinary cars, not 240mph megamachines - and start again, the industry sits up and takes notice.



'Everything needs to change,' he says. 'How the car is designed, how it is made, what it is made from, how much space it takes up on the road, how much fuel it uses.'



He first had the glimmer of the idea for what became the T25 back in 1993.



'I was sitting on the A3, in a jam, thinking: "This cannot be sustainable." '

Gordon Murray was behind the most radical sports car ever - the McLaren F1



And so in the intervening years Gordon Murray has come up with a concept that might - just might - save the car. His design is a wholly new form of automobile; a machine as different from the Audis and Citroens and Fords of today as today's cars are from the Model T of yesteryear - in fact, MORE different.



Murray has not unveiled his invention yet. The mock-ups and prototypes that exist remain firmly under wraps at the company's HQ in Surrey.



But he does give me some strong hints of what this amazing machine will be like and, most importantly, how it will be made.



First, he tells me what is wrong with existing cars, and why all the 'futuristic' technologies out there - like hybrids and fuel cells - are dead ends, and why the conventional car's days are numbered.



Modern cars are far too heavy, for a start and heavy cars use a lot of fuel. The average family hatchback weighs close to one-and-a-half tons - nearly TWICE as much as an old VW Beetle or Ford Anglia.



Murray is particularly scathing about Chelsea Tractors, the 4X4s which until so recently were bizarrely popular with the middle classes (despite being for the most part neither sporty nor utilitarian).



'They are ridiculous and will soon become extinct. I cannot understand why anyone except a Welsh Hill farmer would buy a two-ton car.'



Car companies insist their vehicles have to be big and heavy to satisfy demands for comfort and safety, but Murray puts it down to lazy engineering: 'Car design is driven entirely by styling and marketing. If the marketing people say we need more legroom, instead of being clever, they just make the car longer.'



By making cars lighter, you start on a virtuous circle - you need less power, which means a smaller (and lighter) engine, smaller and lighter brakes and so on. It is hard today to buy a car which weighs less than a ton; Murray thinks he can build a full-sized car which meets all safety standards that will weigh not much more than half this. And this is not engineering geekery.

Murray is particularly scathing about 'Chelsea tractors', until recently the 4X4s so popular with the middle classes



Lighter cars mean much greener cars. All the great hooha over emissions and taxes, fuel costs and CO2-related parking and congestion charges ignores the fact that simply by shaving 10 per cent off the weight of every car in the UK we could dramatically cut transport emissions at a stroke - far more so than by adopting expensive and complex new technologies such as hybrids and fuel cells.



Murray thinks all these space-age technologies are dead ends: 'Don't get me going on electric cars. They are far too heavy, for a start.' And what about hybrids, like the sainted Toyota Prius, the transport of choice for Hollywood A-listers and British Guardianistas alike? 'A waste of space,' Murray says, 'Too complicated.'



Plus there are safety issues: 'Who wants to be sitting on top of a high-amperage battery in a crash?'



Hydrogen fuel cell cars exist - I have driven one - but they cost a fortune, use rare and expensive metals in their construction, don't work in cold weather and seem to be innately dangerous (their fuel is leaky and explodes like a bomb if it catches fire).



What is needed is something both revolutionary and simple - the T25.



What Murray has designed is not so much a car as a way of making a car. He will not build the cars himself, but is in talks with several major manufacturers (sadly, none of them British) with a view to licensing his design and manufacturing process.



So how is the T25 different? What is it, exactly? Without going into patent-risking detail, he sketches out the basics. The new car will be built on a separate chassis - like most pre-war cars, in fact.

'Who wants to be sitting on top of a high-amperage battery in a crash?' says Murray of the popular Toyota Prius



It will be small - bigger than a GWiz but not much bigger than a Smart car - and based on an incredibly light, computer-designed steel frame and powered by a tiny petrol or diesel engine, although manufacturers will be able to put in an electric motor if the market dictates.



The body panels will be made from a rugged plastic, reinforced with fibre and produced from recycled materials. Everything bolts together, can be easily repaired and the whole design is simple enough to be made in a small factory with a handful of workers, anywhere in the world.



And the overall impact on the environment, in terms of carbon dioxide and materials used, will be less than half that of a normal car.



The trick says Murray, is to slice the car up, like a loaf of bread, and decide which is the ideal material for each bit - ideal in terms of cost, weight and green-ness.



So far, so good. But the T25 is less than eight feet long. That's shorter than an old Mini. How on earth are you going to fit anyone in?



'It was hard,' says Murray. He won't give the game away - I think the seating plan is the key to the T25 - but he suggests, mysteriously, that 'it all depends on how you sit'.



Perhaps it will allow rear- seat passengers to extend their legs under the people in front?



So far, the images of the T25 that have appeared are guesswork, although Murray admits those shown here are 'reasonable'. What we have, then, is a Tardis-like machine, small and blobby on the outside yet incredibly spacious on the inside. A work of genius - if he can pull it off.



Murray could have found the Holy Grail, but it will not succeed if no one wants to buy it.



People buy cars not only for their ability to get from A to B, but for their usefulness and fuel economy. And there is something else important to consider - the sex appeal of a machine that is innately tied to things like status, fashion, wealth and desirability of its driver.



Can a cheap practical planet-saving car be sexy? Yes, Murray says, pointing to the original Austin Mini which was the first truly classless car, driven by models, rock stars and royalty as well as millions of ordinary people.



'This has to have the fashion accessory feel,' he says. 'People will have to say: "I want one." '



And it needs to be fun to drive. Most modern cars are 'dead from the neck down', says Murray. His car will be light, responsive and handle like a sportster - much like the old Mini, in fact.



With luck, the first of Murray's wonder cars will be unveiled within a year or so. We could be driving them in time for the London Olympics.



Ten years ago, when the world was rich, I wouldn't have put much money on a super-frugal midget of a car like this succeeding.



But in a credit- crunched, overcrowded and congested world, the £5,500 car ,which will survive the £10 gallon, might come into its own.



I have no idea if the T25 will 'work'; I am surprised by Murray's dismissal of electric power, but if he doesn't know what he is talking about, then no one does. What is certain is that in a few years we will look back upon today's bloated off-roaders and thousand-horsepower megamachines as simply museum curiosities.

The more you think about it, the more ridiculous it seems that the average family car can now do more than 120mph. And why people choose to buy cars that can climb mountains and cross deserts when they live in Croydon has always been beyond me.



A new kind of car would be more than an engineering curiosity. A great deal of our world - how we live, where we live, how we go to work and where we shop and spend our leisure time - is dictated by the motor car. The automobile, to a large extent, defines the landscape of our lives.



Murray is, undoubtedly, an engineering genius. If I had a spare few million pounds I would buy one of his F1s (and probably invest in his T25). But it is beginning to look as though his greatest talent of all is in another area altogether: Timing.