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posted by CoolHand on Monday April 20 2015, @03:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the better-living-through-racing dept.

Shell is funding Gordon Murray Design (designer for 3 McLaren F1 championship wins and also the F1 supercar) and engine specialists Geo Technology with Osamu Goto (ex-Honda F1 engines) to build a city car prototype by the end of the year. It will be interesting to see if they are able to bring the un-obtanium technology of F1 to a super mileage small city car--at an affordable price.

Shell has a long history of funding Economy Runs (first informal event in 1939) and Eco-marathon engineering competitions.

Murray has already done the T25 concept city car with central driver's seat. (Caution -- Flash-heavy and ego-heavy(!) site. Murray may be a design genius, but he wants to make sure that you know this...)

From the article:

One billion reasons why car technology has got to get better

Imagine twice as many people moving around your city. What would that mean for you getting to where you need to be? More traffic, more pollution, less space to move around. There are an estimated one billion cars on our roads right now and the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts this will have doubled by 2050.

While alternatives, including electric vehicles, have an increasing role in meeting this demand, experts predict that we will still be relying on fossil fuels to power our vehicles for decades to come. This means we need to think of more innovative ways to move people and goods around. We need to consider how we could make the conventional internal combustion engine work more efficiently, while emitting less CO2, and we need to explore how we can put this into action using existing and readily available infrastructures.

 
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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by WillAdams on Monday April 20 2015, @03:13PM

    by WillAdams (1424) on Monday April 20 2015, @03:13PM (#173148)

    I'd buy something from: http://www.eliomotors.com/ [eliomotors.com] if it were shipping now --- ages ago Nissan had a similar 1+1 design which was estimated to get 100MPG+, but never even made it to a show (I believe there were some photos in magazines and a single prototype and that was it).

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2015, @03:33PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2015, @03:33PM (#173151)

    41,000 paid reservations. 0 actual vehicles sold.

    I was excited about about this years ago. When they failed to reach market in the first year or so, not so much. I thought they had gone into bankruptcy and blown away long ago.

  • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday April 20 2015, @04:46PM

    by mhajicek (51) on Monday April 20 2015, @04:46PM (#173181)

    I was excited about Elio for a couple years, and Alias before that. There have been several other similar attempts, all have failed so far. Why?

    --
    The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
  • (Score: 2) by slinches on Monday April 20 2015, @08:10PM

    by slinches (5049) on Monday April 20 2015, @08:10PM (#173261)

    I think Elio has a real shot at going into production. They have being doing all the right things on the design side and hold rights to the old GM plant in Shreveport for production. They have also done a lot of work to help get the legal issues of a 3-wheel car worked out. Actually where I live (AZ), they've already passed legislation that exempts "autocycles" from needing a motorcycle license endorsement (and there are no helmet laws here).

    The only reason I'm not on the pre-order list already is funding. If they get the ATVM loan, I'll have no qualms about going for the $1000 non-refundable deposit.