UK to pioneer electric car development - Introduction

What Car?'s associate editor, Roger Stansfield, today met Gordon Murray: the man behind plans to develop and build revolutionary electric car prototypes in the UK.

Who is Gordon Murray?
Gordon Murray is one of the most original thinkers of his generation when it comes to car design. Murray was the man who designed the Brabham Formula One 'fan car', which functioned like a giant Hoover to suck the car to the ground. It was banned after just one, victorious, outing.

He went on to devise the space-efficient three-seater layout in the McLaren F1 road car. Now he is turning his attention to affordable, sustainable road transport.

'We are facing the next industrial revolution and that will require innovative thinking,' he told What Car? 'But true innovation can only come from a clean-sheet-of-paper approach.

'We didn't just want to take a steel-bodied car and then electrify it, which would push the weight up to 1.5 tonnes. That way you get on a wrong-way spiral and the car just gets heavier and heavier. Most designers never get the chance to start something from scratch like this.'

Murray describes his ideas as 'disruptive' in that they do not fit any conventional thinking on car design, and he believes that this way he can create something that will set a template for the next 25, 30 or 40 years.