Gordon Murray Reveals The Seating Layout On The New T.25 City Car

Featured, Miscellaneous | Dean | September 7, 2009 at 04:03

Gordon Murray has released a few more details on his new T.25 City Car. The new city car from the South African designer will stand the chance to be the next-century Beetle model. Gordon Murray is well known for designing the McLaren F1 supercar, where he has now decided to move onto greener cars.

The new T.25 City Car has had its seating arrangement released online, where the idea of the car puts the driver in the middle of the car — similar to the F1. There will be six different possible seat layouts, where they can be adjusted for space or safety.

There will be 750 litres of storage space, which is equivalent to around six shopping trolleys.

The driver-in-the-middle set up is called the iCenter and Murray adopted this idea in 1966, when he was still living in South Africa. It was said that this set up allows for the driver to function the car by using two pedals and buttons to go forwards and backwards.

The design group is still however trying to find a company to help produce the car.

Press Release:

GORDON MURRAY DESIGN REVEAL T.25 CITY CAR SEATING LAYOUT

Gordon Murray Design’s T.25 City Car is not only designed around a central driving position but an MPV package offering 6 internal layouts within the same vehicle, each layout being easily achieved within 30 seconds.

The T.25 City Car has been packaged to accept three 95th percentile occupants and the central driving position has been named ‘iCentre®’, although the actual concept dates back to 1966 when Gordon Murray first came up with the idea during his Mechanical Engineering studies at Durban Institute of Technology in South Africa. The three-seat configuration was put into production with the McLaren F1 and then resurrected in 1999 during the original study for Murray’s City Car – then known as Project 3.

The central driving position gives unparalleled control and visibility whilst supporting the ultra-flexible interior space. This gives the T.25 a potential market advantage over the Smart Fortwo which is purely a two-seater with a small luggage capacity. In maximum ‘shopping mode’ the T.25 can be driver only but offers 750 litres of stowage space which is equal to 6 shopping trolleys in volume!

The two pedal vehicle does not have a gear lever but instead relies on push buttons with the options of fully automatic or manual using Forward, Reverse & Neutral.

Gordon Murray Design are currently in discussions with several interested parties to move the car into production using the iStream® Manufacturing process. iStream® is a unique, innovative method of producing cars invented by Gordon Murray Design which, amongst other things, reduces the area and investment of a typical car factory by 80%.