Shell concept car

How do we balance growing transport energy demand with the need to transition to a lower carbon energy future?

Our solution is to collaborate and innovate, making the most of our existing technologies, improving energy efficiency and reducing the impact on our environment.

Our mission for the Shell Concept Car was to jointly design, test and build an energy-efficient concept city car. This car had to be affordable, accessible and capable of reducing personal transport energy use in a material way. All this was to be achieved using advanced technologies available today.

Shell has brought together Geo Technology and Gordon Murray Design in order to achieve collectively what neither group could achieve apart.

Small but packed with potential

The three-seat Shell Concept Car runs on petrol, weighs only 550kgs (1,212lbs) and uses a third (34%) less energy over its entire lifetime compared to a typical petrol-powered city car.

You could build and drive the Shell Concept Car for more than 100,000km and still use less energy than it takes to manufacture and deliver a typical SUV available in the UK into a showroom. In the formal New European Driving Cycle (NEDC) fuel-efficiency test, the Shell Concept Car produced lower CO₂ emissions than both a typical petrol-powered city car (28%) and a hybrid car (32%).

It has already completed 3,000 miles (4,800km) on test tracks and rolling roads where it achieved 107 miles per gallon, 2.64 litres per 100km, 38km/litres or 89.1 miles per gallon US at 45mph/70kmph.

Shell is not intending to take this car into commercial production. Instead, we alongside our partners, see it as a conversation starter: a way to accelerate the dialogue about how we make road vehicles more energy efficient and less carbon-intensive.