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carguy writes:

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.