Mitsubishi i-Miev - coming sooner?

It may look like a giant soya bean on wheels, but the upcoming Mitsubishi i-Miev is nonetheless a tasty prospect.

Based on the awkwardly named “i” city car, the i-Miev dispenses with fossil-fuel dinosaur power in favour of lithium-ion high-tech motivation. It’s designed to deliver a range of 100 miles and a terminal velocity of 80mph, and if it falls short Mitsubishi will only have itself to blame. Or itself to half-blame. The batteries hail from Lithium Energy Japan, a joint venture between GS Yuasa and Mitsubishi .

Why are we writing about it now, bearing in mind all this info has been floating about out there for ages? Well, it turns out there’s some wrangling going on between Mitsubishi Motors UK and the Japanese top brass as to when the electric bean-mobile ought to make its debut on European roads.

Japan gets the i-Miev next year and it’s not due to land in Europe until 2010. But the UK arm of the firm is twisting limbs back home to bring the car here earlier – for a London launch next year.

Now that the London Congestion charge is back to square one, charging even the smallest petrol and diesel cars full whack for entry, the capital is once again proving a magnet for EV makers. We can’t wait.

British Motor Show 2008 pictures

Here are a few snaps from our day spent perusing the buffed motors at the British Motor Show.


The small orange lamps in the wheel-arches of the Think City electric car stick out more than we expected. Not good for a city car. We hope they're not expensive to replace.



Somebody disliked Japanese hydrogen-fuel-cell cars enough to give the Honda FCX Clarity a nasty gouge with a key. Someone over on a visit from Detroit, maybe?



The fabulous Morgan Life Car leaves onlookers in no doubt as to its cultural roots:



A side view of the ultra-compact Super Light Electric Sport Car. It really is an intriguing little thing and we wish it were destined for production.



Once in place, the cockpit of the Super Light is a great place to be. Getting there is a less pleasant exercise in contortionism. Looks easy - but isn't.

Electric atmosphere at the London Motor Show

Quite a change at this year’s London Motor Show compared to the last one, two years ago, where electric cars were relegated to the small stands at the cheap end of the hall. This year they were smack in the middle of the show, literally and metaphorically.

The phallic Lightning electric supercar, unveiled to much fanfare on Tuesday, is breathtaking but pointlessly large, heavy and extravagant. And a bit iffy. Its claimed 10-minute recharge time demands a hefty industrial three-phase supply and would create problems we have already discussed at length here at Auto IT. We do like its “+” and “-” accelerator and brake pedals, though, even if they aren’t original.

Pedals aside, we preferred the miniscule Super Light Electric Sport Car, a Nice Car Company/Cranfield University design study. Shame it’s not destined for production. The scissor doors incorporating targa roof panels add drama but subtract practicality: they get in the way as you struggle to fold your leg in through the tiny door opening. Inside it feels cosy or claustrophobic, depending on whether you like spending time locked inside a carbon fibre cupboard. According to the bored bloke in a Nice shirt lounging nearby, it won’t go into production because “it’d be too expensive, wouldn’t it”. That’s how to win friends and influence people.

Nice was of course also showing off a two-seat electric whiz-kid you will be able to buy later this year, the made-in-Hong-Kong MyCar. Taller and cuter than the Super Light, the MyCar (or MyQuadricycle to be brutally accurate) will cost £8,995 and will travel 55 miles and at 40mph after a 5-hour charge. The combination of a 710kg kerb weight, four lead-acid batteries and a DC motor suggest a sluggish rate of progress. We’ll have to wait till we can drive it to be sure.

Still, it felt great inside, with good seats and a dashboard design that revels in its shiny plastic materials, rather than trying to ape the soft-feel rubberised mainstream and falling short, like the Nice Mega City.

The interior of the Think City is okay, but we weren’t quite convinced that the exterior has the quality look and feel to justify its planned price. It looks like a product of Addis, purveyor of plastic kitchenware. The sticky-out amber lights in the wheel-arches look odd, and there’s something really strange going on in the bodywork where the front wing meets the lower leading edge of the door. When you see one, you’ll see what we mean.

Our star of the show? Everyone raved about Honda’s OSM sportster, which is lovely, but we were quite taken by the production version of the Toyota iQ. In the metal this poor little posh car looks much more mature, solid, interesting and appealing than in pictures. It will seat four at a pinch, but will boast CO2 emissions of just 99g/km and cost less than £10,000 with lots of toys as standard when it goes on sale this year. We want one.

With Honda intent on putting small hybrids into production, we wonder if Toyota will be tempted to offer an iQ with batteries and a motor? With all that’s changed in the last two years, stranger things could happen.

Is Gordon Murray’s city car too small for the city?

We can’t help worrying about Gordon Murray’s T.25, since learning its likely dimensions earlier this month.

To recap, the T.25 is going to be quite tall, very narrow, and really short: about 240cm long and 130cm wide, in fact.

For those people who find abstract distances hard to comprehend, look at it this way: the T.25 will be about the same width as a GoinGreen G-Wiz. And 20cm shorter than a G-Wiz.

Now we’ve driven a G-Wiz, and it’s not exactly overflowing with leg and elbow room. Think economy airline. And don’t think about exuberant cornering unless your passengers don’t mind being elbowed in the ear.

A cramped interior is one thing, rubbish ride around town is another. In a city car, it’s a bit of a no-no.

Trouble is, the T.25 is just too small to cope well with that modern curse of the urban rat-run, the speed bump.

In the UK, lots of speed-bumps are of the “cushion” variety, which most drivers prefer to negotiate by straddling – driving so that the speed hump passes between the wheels. In the G-Wiz you can’t do that, and the T.25 will be the same. The UK Department for Transport recommends that cushion humps should be between 160 to 170cm wide. The T.25 is therefore 30cm too narrow to even think about straddling.

The other thing to think about is pitching up and down over full-width speed ramps. The shorter the wheelbase, the more pronounced the bucking-bronco motion as you try to smoothly pass over the sleeping policeman. And the T.25 is going to have a really short wheelbase.

When we drove the G-Wiz i, we found it easily capable of keeping up with urban traffic – except on all those inner city roads with traffic calming measures. Over the ramps, we had to slow to the pace of an arthritic snail so as not to flatten our heads on the roof lining.

The alternative is to fit suspension that’s ultra-soft in some circumstances and firm in others – using the kind of active springs and dampers that are found on expensive sports saloons and 4x4s. But given that Murray’s stated aim is to reduce the complexity of the T.25, somehow we doubt this will be on the cards.

So, er, it’ll be bouncing over the speed bumps, then.

Nice thinks big, and Chinese

The Nice Car Company yesterday announced a new electric car, set to be exhibited at next week’s London Motor Show. Called the Ze-O, the Nice company describe it as “styled in Europe and manufactured by Nice’s partners in China”. We thought it looked familiar – the picture issued by Nice is actually of the Changhe Ideal 2, a facelifted version of a 2003 car originally designed by Italian style house Bertone.

Changhe sells the Ideal 2 in various parts of the world with petrol engines, but for the Ze-O Nice has obviously deleted the oily bits and replaced them with batteries and a motor. Nice quotes “a range of up to 65 miles in city driving and top speed of 55 mph”. Power evidently comes via the miracle of lead and sulphuric acid, given that Nice says the option of a lithium-ion pack will be on the cards “soon”.

Nice describes its new baby as an MPV, but at only 3.6m in length the Ze-O is actually shorter than a Ford Fiesta.

The Ze-O will set you back £14,000 and the first cars will trundle out onto cratered UK roads in the autumn.

It might not be called Ze-O by then – we expect the lawyers at Chrysler will be limbering up to deliver a nastygram, given that its Dodge arm may rightly argue that it got there first. It called its recent electric muscle-car show pony “Zeo”. These car companies like to hang onto their names, and we doubt the lawyers will be put off by a little bit of fancy punctuation.

Good news plus Murray's midget

We were surprised and delighted to see new London Mayor Boris Johnson honour his manifesto pledge to scrap planned changes to the Congestion Charge. Deposed car-hater Ken Livingstone’s scheme for stinging owners of large cars was to have been sweetened by free entry for Band B cars, a piece of political hokey-cokey that, as a by-product, would have killed off the UK’s nascent electric car industry.

Johnson’s move, coupled with Gordon Brown’s recent posturing over cleaner motoring, makes it seem safe to put money into electric horseless carriages after all.

Meanwhile, we were equally delighted by the gallery of pictures posted by Gordon Murray Design, following its recent first anniversary party. Snaps of the gift-wrapped T.25 city car give a much clearer indication of the underlying shape than the ill-lit effort we lifted from Car Magazine in our last post. We concede that Murray's midget almost certainly will be a conventionally arranged four-seater, contrary to speculation in our last missive. Images of the front of the foil-wrapped car show that the proportions probably will cope with normal two-abreast seating. It’s going to be a squeeze, though. Not a car for the clinically obese, we feel.

We hope that the finished T.25 will be less annoying than the Gordon Murray Design home page, where visitors have no choice but to sit through a pointless 20-second opening sequence before they can get to any actual content. We visited the site three times before remembering to bookmark the useful pages, and that’s a whole minute of our lives we’ll never get back. Good design? No.

Gordon Murray's city car project takes shape

We’ve been keenly awaiting more details of Gordon Murray’s forthcoming T.25 city car, and on the first anniversary of the project’s founding Murray provided more insight than we expected.

A newly released sketch shows that the design thinking has progressed – the proportions of the beast in the sketch are different to a similar sketch dated 2005. The front axle line is further forward, the wheels are smaller, the cab is further forward.

But much more can be gleaned from Car Magazine’s photos from the anniversary event. There, a T.25 prototype or styling buck wrapped in foil gave more than a hint at the finished product. Through the silver wrappings we can see that the car is Renault Kangoo tall, has a very upright rear, and has very clearly defined front wings - or perhaps even cycle-style front mudguards.

More intriguing still, it looks as if the A-pillars dive inwards as well as downwards as they curve towards the T.25’s nose. The windscreen will clearly be a lot wider at its top than at its base. Which makes us wonder... Normal two-abreast front seating would seem to offer pretty poor forward vision, with an A-pillar cutting right across the driver’s view. So it’s tempting to guess that the T.25 might offer a central driving position, perhaps with two passenger seats set further to the rear. This is, of course, exactly the seating arrangement found in Murray’s McLaren F1 supercar.

Car Magazine’s report says there will be four seats, but the details released by Gordon Murray Design are less specific. If there are four seats inside, passengers will sit very upright and will have to be good friends.

The company does say that NCAP 4-star protection will be offered, and it’s hard to see how this will be achieved. Images released by the company show that the T.25 will be shorter and narrower than a Smart ForTwo. And while we don’t doubt Murray’s ability to design a stiff, crush-proof passenger cell, we wonder where the energy absorbing crash structures will go. These are important for slowing down the overall impact so that accelerations are tolerable. After all, there’s no point in keeping the passenger compartment intact if the G-loading is sufficient to snap the occupants’ necks.

These questions will all be addressed, of course. And given the pace of the project to date, we may see the finished T.25 much sooner than we expect.

Spotted: new Mega City in the wild

We couldn't help noticing this bright tangerine new-style Nice Mega City electric car, parked in central London's busy Wardour Street the other day. The lack of vendor livery suggests it might even be a customer car, rather than a demonstrator or promotional vehicle.

So that's one sold, at least.

The restyle works really well, we reckon. The new car looks a lot more attractive from the side, particularly where the swoopy curve has replaced the old angular chop around the C-pillar. The new rear side-window radius echoes the curve of the screen pillar, and gives the daylight opening a cohesive symmetry. Shame about the yawning fist-sized voids betwen the tops of the tyres and the wheelarches.

We peered inside, as you do, trying not to look like we were about to nick it. The interior looks to have much the same neat but rather flimsy centre console as the old model.

Judging from Car Magazine's recent test drive, the biggest complaints we had when we drove the old car last year - lack of acceleration beyond 30mph and "crashingly bad" ride quality - still remain to be fixed. Still, one thing at a time.

Scottish hybrid system makes for a better BMW

Anyone with an ounce of engineering sympathy will feel a natural suspicion of petrol-electric hybrids like the Toyota Prius and Honda Civic IMA. Transforming energy from one form to another is generally a wasteful process, shuffling backward and forward from one to another doubly so. In the Prius, regenerative braking followed by assisted acceleration is a case in point. Kinetic energy of motion is first transformed into electrical energy by the generator, and this is then converted to potential energy in the battery chemistry. On acceleration, reversible chemical reactions in the battery release electricity, powering the motor to build up kinetic energy once again. It’s a complicated and loss-prone round-trip. Bad, therefore, from an engineering standpoint.

This messy business is one reason why Formula 1 cars, required to run regenerative systems next year, will be using Flybrid flywheels rather than batteries to temporarily bottle up energy during the slow bits of a lap. A wholly mechanical system with no major energy conversions is just so much more efficient in a world where every erg counts.

An interesting alternative has recently emerged from a Scottish company called Artemis Intelligent Power, exploiting fluid power research done at the University of Edinburgh.

Artemis offers a novel type of hydraulic actuator, which can act as either a motor or pump. It relies on a radial arrangement of pistons with ultra-rapid, digitally switched valves and has a very high claimed efficiency. In other words it wastes very little in turning the potential energy of pressurised hydraulic fluid into rotational mechanical energy, and vice versa. The system is called Digital Displacement.

Interesting for diggers and tractors, of course, but also – surprisingly – interesting for hybrid road cars.

To show off the potential of its new components, the company has butchered a BMW 5-Series and given it a transmission transplant. In place of a mechanical gearbox, driveshafts and differential, the Bimmer now boasts a hydraulic-pneumatic set-up.

Under the car, the engine drives a Digital Displacement pump, pipes carry pressurised hydraulic fluid rearward to the back axle, and there a pair of Digital Displacement drives get the rear wheels moving independently.

The pump and drives don’t have to spin at the same rate, allowing the overall computerised system to provide infinitely variable transmission ratios. The engine can spin at its most efficient rate, irrespective of the speed of the car, depending only on the power demands made by the driver’s right foot. We’ve not tried it, but Artemis says the car remains highly drivable and retains its original performance envelope.

Hybrid energy storage is done pneumatically. During braking, the rear actuators switch from drive mode to pump mode, putting energy back into the hydraulic system and using it to pressurise a gas cylinder. When acceleration is demanded later, the energy stored in the cylinder is released back into the hydraulics, driving the wheels.

It’s a neat, purely mechanical system that cuts out the wasteful electrical and chemical steps demanded by a petrol-electric setup.

And the results speak for themselves: on the tough urban cycle the BMW 530i normally scores 20.4mpg; with Artemis’s digital hydraulic system, it scored an independently verified 40.1mpg. Beyond the urban crawl, the standard car gives 29.7mpg on the combined cycle – the hydraulic car achieved 39.6mpg.

And finally, Artemis says its hydraulic transmission is “potentially much more durable, lighter and cheaper than electric hybrids”, with their engine-plus-motor-plus-batteries bloat.

To put it cornily, the land of the rising sun may currently have the lead in hybrid technology, but the canny Scots could soon put them in the shade.

The crushing truth about traffic jams

Oxford academic Nick Bostrom has come up with a startling piece of statistical reasoning that is well worth considering the next time you’re stuck in a traffic jam on a motorway or dual carriageway. It’s not just your frustrated imagination: the cars in the other lanes really are going faster than you.

Of course it’s not always true that you’re in the slower lane, but the law of averages means that most of the time, in most jams, you’ll spend the bulk of your time in the slower lane.

This is a simple result of the fact that the slower lane is the one that tends to have a greater density of cars in it. From the perspective of the jam as a whole, you are an unremarkable random motorist. And since there are more cars in the slower lane, the chances are that you will be in the lane with the most vehicles in it. All travelling slowly. It stands to reason.

The solution, therefore, is clear. To make better progress, don’t sit there like an idiot. Change lanes. And don’t just change lanes when you think your lane is slower – change lanes whenever you see a gap that will accommodate you in another lane, whether or not it happens to be making better progress than your own at the time. According to Bostrom, statistics decree that this will get you out of the jam quicker. Apparently.

Why is it that we suspect Bostrom drives a BMW 3-Series?