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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.
(Score: 2) by dltaylor on Monday April 20 2015, @06:40PM
The technology of F1is not that special, but the amount of money to apply it is unbelievable. The PHBs of F1 blather about "cost saving" while actually driving up the costs. Examples begin with the engine and transmission requirements. Unlike other for forms of motorsport, most notably Top Fuel and Funny Car drag racers where engines are frequently rebuilt between runs at the same event, F1 engines and transmissions are supposed to be used for several races without replacement. This leads to the use of incredibly expensive materials and tremendous expense to research them.
"We will have hybrids" was the mandate, but these do not use the same relatively inexpensive batteries as a Prius. These are high-voltage, very fast recharge batteries that require a safety indicator on the exterior of the car to provide lethal shock hazard notice to the track workers.
If "city cars" are intended to be sold for several million Euros each, then F1 is definitely a model for them. I'm much less sure that engineers accustomed to using "cost is little object" materials and production processes will be able to design a nearly throw-away basic city car.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday April 20 2015, @07:39PM
You don't invent better lubrication tweaks if you're allowed to rebuild the engine between races.
And if the "high-voltage, very fast recharge batteries" are what satisfies the 300kph crash requirement, maybe they'll find their place in my car in 10 years.
Also, F1-style acceleration is what consumes the most gas in regular cars: I don't know why Ecars have one battery system, when the need is two: one for starts (small cap, high output), one for cruising (Biggest cap, lower current)
Is it worth the massive sums dedicated to the Cult Of Bernie (and the lackluster spectacle of the last season) ? It might well be.