The Dewar Trophy, one of the most prestigious honours in the UK automotive industry, has been awarded to Gordon Murray Design for its development of iStream technology – a new process for the high volume manufacture of lightweight vehicles.
The trophy was presented to the company’s founder, Prof Gordon Murray, for his team’s development and application of the innovative chassis concept, including its use in the Global Vehicle Trust OX all-terrain vehicle – a cheap and durable flat-pack truck designed for the developing world. Prof Murray will be talking about the process later this month at The Engineer’s Collaborate To Innovate conference
An iStream-constructed chassis is at the heart of the OX, featuring steel tubes bonded together by plates. In more expensive vehicles, the plates would be carbon fibre but here they are ‘engineered plywood’, an incredibly strong and cheap material that helps contribute to the OX’s 1,900kg payload capacity.
The iStream process keeps costs as low as possible, too, requiring no steel pressing or expensive robot assembly; only simple jigs. Overall investment in factory and vehicle set-up is about five per cent of a conventional vehicle.
John Wood MBE, Chairman of the Dewar Technical Committee, said: “Gordon Murray Design’s iStream technique presents a completely new way of thinking about vehicle construction and manufacture. In developing the OX all-terrain vehicle, the versatility of the iStream process is clearly demonstrated, resulting in a strong, durable and extremely affordable structure. It’s a genuine innovation that could positively affect the lives of people in some of the world’s poorest areas.”
Receiving the Dewar Trophy, Gordon Murray, founder of Gordon Murray Design, said: “It’s a great honour to receive such a prestigious award on behalf of our company. I am extremely proud of what our team has achieved in industrialising iStream. Our mission has been to develop Formula One technology to a point where it is accessible to the everyday motorist and to enable affordable lightweighting and to introduce new levels of automotive durability and safety.”
Meanwhile, Riversimple’s Rasa hydrogen fuel cell vehicle was awarded the Simms medal, a prize established to recognise a genuine contribution to motoring innovation by individuals or small companies.
Riversimple’s production prototype delivers on its promise of efficiency and sustainability, with a range of 300 miles from just 1.5kg of hydrogen. Weighing only 580kg and with a carefully honed aerodynamic body, the vehicle returns the equivalent of 250mpg, zero tailpipe emissions and c.40g/km CO2 well-to-wheel.
The Dewar Trophy and Simms Medal are only awarded in years when the Royal Automobile Club’s Dewar Technical Committee deems there have been contenders of sufficient merit. Previous winners of the Dewar Trophy, which has a lineage dating back to 1906, include Rolls-Royce in 1907 for its 40.5hp engine; the British Motor Corporation and Alec Issigonis for the original Mini in 1959; McLaren in 2013 for the P1 hybrid supercar, and GKN Hybrid Power for their Gyrodrive flywheel technology.
Prof Gordon Murray will be presenting the iStream process at The Engineer’s Collaborate To Innovate conference, which will be held on November 17th at Coventry’s Manufacturing Technology centre.
The OX slightly depresses me. It’s so typical for 1st-worlders to design things which they are sure the 3rd-world will want and have no idea how things really work.
For one thing people in poorer countries want Toyota pickups and Mercedes Benzes like everyone else might. For practical vehicles I think they (or I when I was living in Zim) don’t want “cheap” so much as “really reliable” in a way that the Japanese seem to understand better than most. But you can’t always get that cheaply so you need a vehicle that looks shiny and will sell to the people who have money and then depreciate and get sold on to the likes of me when there are some scratches and 60k miles. Fancy shiny cars and trucks are like a financing system where people who want status symbols subsidise the real cost of a good vehicle for the rest of us.
This sort of vehicle will not appeal to the status seekers, so they won’t buy it so that everyone else can get it down the line.
Brilliant observation.
Like anywhere else in the world, vehicles are a form of currency.
If Murray can sell his OX in the UK then he can sell it anywhere. And to be honest, I would buy it, providing it cost me no more than £5K, came with aircon, elctric windows, sat nav and leather; could cruise all day, quietly, at 70MPH and go from Kent to Glasgow on a single tank.
If I wanted a cheap local runabout I can get an old Fiesta for £500.
The Ox slightly depresses you? I’d wager your negativity is the root cause of that
Any one else thinking Africar all over again?
… another issue with this is that the businesses which are making money can afford better things – those that aren’t need finance. Finance is very hard to get in the developing world and mostly because people can easily disappear. With phones you just switch off the access and they are forced to pay. People value communication so much that they will stop paying for all sorts of other things before they stop paying for their phone — hence that’s a great product for finance companies to support. I think that if you can sort out finance and attach it to your product and keep an eye on it and disable it if it’s not paid for then you have a small chance of being able to make a sustainable business.
Importing cars/motorcycles requires quite a lot of capital and each month that your sales increase you need more money than you did last month to re-order new stock. So it’s a kind of gambling with ever increasing odds. If you have a sales drop for a month then you suddenly don’t have the money to pay for the large shipment that’s on it’s way to you for the demand that you anticipated.
The other issue is that currency drops are deadly to an importer and thee swings can kill a business instantly as one’s products begin to go above the point which a customer can afford or get credit for – even by a small percentage. The size of these changes can be enormous by 1st world standards. Suddenly last months sales can’t pay for this months orders in advance – and you go bust.
So I’m just trying to say that it’s far more complicated than “lets make a truck” and if you want to do something like this then you have to have an encompassing plan and it has to show a gigantic profit in your projections because when it comes to the reality you might just break even then.
With reference to the 3rd world wantin bling rather than cheap. I remember a certain mr Roberts designing his wind up radio and making it small. The potential customers said they didn’t want it like that ,they wanted something show offable that looked like a ghetto blaster that rastas used to have to carry on their shoulders ! The radio still worked in what ever guise it was in . As I say when sitting in a traffic jam on the M6 it doesn’t matter if you are in a mini or a Rolls Royce , you are still in a jam and ain’t going anywhere. (it also costs less to be in a mini ! )
I think the comments are going a bit off track here.
Gordon Murray has demonstrated and presented, a new , economical,
workable concept, and needs to be lauded for it.
To make it commercially viable, shiny or otherwise, leave it to the big players
to decide if, when, and how to exploit the technology.