F1 designer Gordon Murray unveils lightweight city car

Imagine a car so narrow that two can drive next to each other in one lane; a car so small and short that three can park in one parking space. Now imagine that the car is built in a shed from glass fibre, recycled plastic bottles and hollow steel tubes, using just a fifth of the material required to build a conventional car.

Such a vehicle would have the potential to prevent gridlock on the world's roads as the number of cars quadruples to 2.5 billion by 2020. It could also help hundreds of millions of people achieve their dream of owning a car, without depleting scarce resources such as water, energy or steel.

Well, that car has been made. It seats three, weighs just 575kg, has a top speed of almost 100mph and is expected to cost about £6,000 ($9,000).

Using fewer and cheaper parts to build cars provides manufacturers with tremendous cost savings, but perhaps more importantly it reduces investment risk as less money is required upfront to get a project started, according to Prof Murray. In the future, car factories could be smaller, cheaper and less polluting than they are today "I love efficiencies in design, but I love efficiencies in business even more," he says. "The actual factory that builds an iStream car - no matter what shape it is, no matter what size it is - is about 20% of the capital investment and 20% of the size of a conventional car manufacturing plant - and about half the energy."

"What we want to do is to sell as many iStream licences to as many people for as many different cars as possible, all around the world," Prof Murray says, hoping to kick-start an automotive revolution.

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source: BBC