Shell Lubricants says it is spending around 1% of its total outlay on the T25S concept car due to be unveiled sometime towards the middle of next year.
The energy saving vehicle is being developed in partnership with The Gordon Murray Design Group and Geo Technologies and under the auspices of Project M.
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The vehicle – designed to squeeze ever-more efficiencies out of internal combustion engines combining lubricant with design and drag reduction technology – is due to be unveiled during the middle of next year with Shell hailing the collaborative nature of the undertaking.
“The Project is being funded by Shell, it is not a huge amount of money on the OEM scale,” said Shell Lubricants Innovation Technology manager, Bob Mainwaring at the energy provider’s Hamburg centre.
“It is good value for money – as a fraction of the total it is about 1% of total [lubricant] spend. This Project has encouraged us to hone techniques we had in the past and make them really sharp.
“The programme is very ambitious – we expect [unveil] at least by the middle next year. We are anxious to gather all the data we want. A key moment for me was to go away from pure liquid consumption to energy consumption – to think about its [vehicle’s] impact on planetary C02 use.”
The fruit of Project M – a concept car known as T25S and itself a derivative of the T25 model – will be a double digit drag reduction aimed at meeting the huge demands being placed on energy consumption with a massively increasing global population.
Project M uses the iStream concept to include lightweighting to allow powertrain and component downsizing, reduce emissions, improve chassis rigidity and employ advanced materials.
As well as the Hamburg site, Shell Lubricants operates research centres in China and Japan and the US, having more than 150 patent series and 200 scientists working on development.
