The founder of Gordon Murray Automotive, the mercurial and legendary Gordon Murray has revealed that his team is working on the development of hybrid, electric and hydrogen-based powertrains. Gordon Murray, of course, is best known as McLaren’s technical director for its F1 cars in the eighties which dominated Formula One with three world championships being won by Ayrton Senna. Then he moved on to the road car side of McLaren where he designed the iconic McLaren F1 which is still considered by many the greatest sports car of all time. He even designed the McLaren Mercedes SLR. More recently after GMA has come out of stealth, he launched the T.50 which is the spiritual successor to the McLaren F1 and the T.33 which takes inspiration from the Ferrari GTs of the late sixties.
Both the new T.50 and T.33 are based on a naturally aspirated Cosworth V12 engine, and these are extremely light cars with epic power-to-weight ratios. Numerous times, Murray has said that this new Cosworth V12 will be the last great V12 and will possibly go down as the greatest V12 engine of all time. He often has said this because of the way the world is moving towards sustainable propulsion and now he has revealed that his team is working on not only electric powertrains but also hybrid and hydrogen-based solutions. This is something that has been reiterated by Philip Lee who is the GMA group boss.
“Eventually we’ll all end up going electric,” Lee told Top Gear in a recent interview. “I think that will be the endpoint and the reason is because legislation will dictate where we’re all going. For GMA, that is something we are working on and we’ve got R&D within Gordon Murray Technologies in order to explore different types of powertrains, all the way through hybridization, electrification, hydrogen, alternative fuels... we’re looking at everything in order to see where the roadmap is,” Lee explained.
In fact, Gordon Murray Automotive has been linked to an electric car project several times. It has been revealed that the brand has been working on two electric SUVs that the company has said will change the way people think about range anxiety and vehicle dynamics. Gordon Murray is known for his obsession with lightweight and compactly packaged vehicles and an SUV with an electric powertrain goes against the grain of that thinking. But if his team can conjure a breakthrough product then obviously things can change.
“The ethos about our brand and what we’re doing is we want people to drive our cars. We want to see them out and about and we want people to enjoy them. They’re not museum pieces to just sit there,” Lee added.
