Gordon Murray is launching his own car company to battle today’s 'complicated and heavy vehicles

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Boutique car manufacturers come and go, often without ever having produced a single viable vehicle. When Gordon Murray announces that he’s going to launch his own performance car company, though, we snap to attention. Murray, the mind behind the legendary McLaren F1 (not to mention a host of racing cars), has long railed against weight and complexity of today’s high-powered cars. So it’s worth keeping an eye his automotive endeavors -- he gets it, man!

Vehicles from Murray’s new company will be built using the so-called iStream production system, which he’s been pushing for years now. Conceived as a whole process for designing and assembling cars, at iStream's core is a composite cell structure a bit like McLaren’s Monocage. The idea is that this structure can be used to underpin a wide range of vehicles, from tiny city pods to rear-wheel-drive sports cars. In this case, we're looking at the latter: Murray's company claims it will start out with a performance offering that promises to "buck the current trend for ever more complicated and heavy vehicles." We’ve seen hints of its potential in a cool Yamaha concept from 2015, and the relaunched TVR is said to build a classic front-mid-engine GT around the structure. Because it’s such a versatile, modular system (or so goes the sales pitch), iStream should help enable production of low-volume niche-market vehicles -- you know, the kind Autoweek readers tend to be interested in -- at a relatively attainable cost.

Indeed, a statement from Gordon Murray Automotive says building cars for a range of clients is still the goal; perhaps after years of shopping iStream around to other manufacturers, Murray and Co. decided to just do it themselves.

But that’s all a little further down the road. We’re very curious to see how Murray’s first new car, the company’s flagship model, will come off. “With our first new car, we will demonstrate a return to the design and engineering principles that have made the McLaren F1 such an icon,” Murray says. Sounds good to us.