Project M: Shell Teams With Gordon Murray on a City Car Concept
There's loads of life left in the good ol' internal-combustion engine, especially as it pertains to moving folks around in our increasingly populous, decreasingly affluent megacities in the decades to come. To help drive this point home, Shell Lubricants and Fuels reunited the team that collaborated to produce the Honda-powered F1 cars that carried Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost to victory in all but one Grand Prix race in 1988, but this time their mission is to build an ultra-efficient, ultra-affordable city car.
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The other players include Osamu Goto, the former director of Honda F1 and R&D manager on Ferrari's F1 team who has since launched a Switzerland-based engine-tech company called Geo Technology, and Gordon Murray, whose F1 team R&D resume includes stints at Brabham from 1969-'86 and at McLaren from '87-'06. His firm, Gordon Murray Design, built a pair of gas- and electric-powered city-car concepts in 2010 called the T.25 and T.27, respectively. They largely served as a showcase for Murray's iStream production process, which was said to greatly lower the cost and energy required to produce a car. Shell provided high-tech, low-friction lubricants for the T.25, but only after the vehicle and driveline were designed. In that car, the lubrication was credited with improving fuel economy by 6.5 percent.
Shell has instigated Project M as a further development/refinement/redesign of GMD's T.25 to showcase what improvements can still be made by coengineering the powertrain and lubricants. According to Shell's VP of lubricant technology, Selda Gunsel, Project M is not meant to become a production car but rather to serve as a "thought leadership paper on wheels," optimizing all areas of the vehicle design, including aerodynamics, lightweight materials, recyclability, cradle-to-grave environmental impact, and friction. "Twenty percent of the energy of combustion has typically gone to friction," Gunsel points out. By leveraging this coengineering opportunity, Shell intends to further reduce that figure. (Shell has ongoing coengineering operations in place at BMW Motorsport and Chrysler.)
The engine that will serve as the basis for Project M is a naturally aspirated, gasoline-powered, 660cc Mitsubishi I-3 from a Japanese-market "kei" car, but with all internal components greatly redesigned. For reasons of cost, it will eschew pricy friction/energy reducers like a variable-output oil pump and auto start-stop, though it will feature hydraulic cam phasers. Much of the emphasis will be on specialized coatings, and the engine will feature smaller-diameter, wider journal bearings for items such as the crank and camshafts.
