Gordon Murray is still being very secretive about his upcoming small city car, codenamed T.25. As a report published this week demonstrated, journalists granted an interview with Murray are reduced to feeling the car through its dust cover, lest they uncover its charms before time.

Via that CBCNews Canada report, we learn that the steering wheel is “not in a conventional place”, something we suspected from the moment we saw photos of the foil-wrapped prototype’s swooping screen pillars.

“The internal layout is absolutely unconventional,” Murray told CBCNews. “You don't get in and out of it the normal way. You don't sit in it the normal way ... And certainly the shut lines on the body would give that away.”

All of which confirms that we should take at face value Murray’s recent patent application for a “compact seating arrangement”. The application asserts that Murray has dreamed up an unconventional layout, and in filing for a patent he has asked for legal recognition of its uniqueness, so that rivals will have to pay a fee to use the same ideas in their own compact cars until the patent expires. That’s assuming the application is approved and the patent granted. The Patent Office could decide the innovation is too obvious, or not original enough - more of which later.

So how will the T25 work? How will it cram four adults into a footprint smaller than a two-seat Smart?

Well, it won’t. The layout Murray wants to patent seats three adults, not four: one driver in a central position, plus two passengers seated behind and either side of the driver; the trio forming a triangle with its point facing forward. As the patent application goes on to explain, the height and the shapes of the three seats allow the occupants to be squashed together to a remarkable extent. Everyone will sit more upright than is the norm in a car, rear-passenger knees will slip into voids cut in the driver’s seat back. Passenger legs will stretch out either side of the driver as far as the front wheel-arches.

The arrangement has lots of advantages for a small car - it can be short and narrow and yet reasonably comfortable for all three occupants. The driver, in particular, will enjoy a footwell free of the intrusion and offsetting that so often blights the small car experience. The driver might get the odd dig in the ribs from a passenger’s knee, but all-round visibility will be great - better than in a Toyota iQ carrying three adults, where the front passenger sits further forward than the driver, compromising safety at junctions.

The snag is that the central driver’s seat might be tricky to sit in without a crouch and a scramble from the door, since it sits a couple of feet further inboard from the sills than is normal. Murray’s solution is to create headroom by removing part of the roof along with the door - hence his coyness about shutlines.

The other goal Muray has for his miniaturised runabout is nose-to-the-kerb parking, and the patent document acknowledges that each side door will need to open upwards, in Lamborghini scissor fashion or Delorean gullwing mode, or will need to slide out of the way like a van’s side door, taking a part of the roof with it.

Interestingly, we’ve seen much the same seating layout proposed by Heuliez for its promised three-seat electric car, the Friendly. Its doors do indeed slide completely out of the way, along with a piece of the roof - and a piece of the floor too.

What’s more, documents released by Heuliez show a very similar seating layout to the one proposed by Murray. In fact Heuliez’s computer-generated images would not look out of place alongside Murray's text.

All of which makes us wonder whether Murray will succeed in getting his patent.

However, we suspect that Murray has a few more tricks up his sleeve to reveal yet. After all, the sketches of the T.25 released at the start of the project (and at the one year mark) seem to be deliberately designed to throw us all off the scent, showing details that we now know are not going to feature in the car - such as a front-mounted engine. It’s reasonable to suppose that his patent application is far from Murray’s final word on the T.25’s innovations.

We’re not sure who has done best out of today’s deal between American electric sports-car startup Tesla and stodgy Teutonic wagen-maker Daimler, owner of Mercedes-Benz and Smart. For its $10m-plus investment Daimler gets a 10 per cent stake in Tesla, access to its innovative battery technology, plus a bit of rubbed-off sexiness. In return for a chunk of itself, Tesla gets the money, obviously, plus access to Daimler’s big-car-company engineering resources and a bit of rubbed-off solidity. Perhaps the Mercedes-Benz truck division might be able to furnish Tesla with a two-speed transmission that doesn't snap, for example.

The deal values Tesla at in excess of $100m, by the by, which is not bad for a company that's delivered not much in the way of product and nothing at all in profit.

We hope we'll see future products from both companies that are as exciting and innovative as the Tesla Roadster and as reliable and well engineered as an S-Class.

Hopefully we won't see Teslas that are as desirable as a Düsseldorf taxi. Or, for that matter, electric Smarts that cost a fortune, arrive late and don't work properly.

No, hang on, we already have the latter...

Well we got the price wrong. The ECC Evie electric car went on sale yesterday and costs from £16,850, not £15,000 as we’d hoped. Nearly 17 grand is a substantial increase on the C1's base list price of £7,795 – which is before the generous discount you can expect from a double-chevron dealer – and serves to underscore that lithium ion batteries remain as cheap to buy as Jimmy Choo shoes.

ECC’s swanky London launch was attended by lots of people in suits, seasoned with the odd journalist or indeed blogger standing out by virtue of their sartorial slumming and canapé cramming. The suits were mostly potential customers or partners – we small-talked with people from a breakdown provider, an energy company and a local authority.

We are still waiting for some basic facts about the Evie – we don’t know how much power or torque its electric motor produces, for example, although we can tell you that it doesn’t feel like there’s much of either under the bonnet. Drivers hoping to explore the Evie’s 60mph top speed will be in for a long wait.

The car does look and feel well put together, though. The interior is pure Citroen, with the existing gauges and controls. There’s still a tiny petrol pump symbol next to the LCD gauge that now shows battery charge, for example. And because the batteries aren’t lumps of lead, weight and weight distribution are good – at 900-odd kilograms the car weighs about the same as a standard C1 plus a fat friend. It all feels very comfortable and normal. Even the hot air blower works, by virtue of an immersion heater in the existing matrix, apparently, now that the waste heat from the engine coolant is no longer available.

Lifting the bonnet reveals a nondescript black box and chunky cables plus, surprisingly, the car’s original lead-acid battery. This presumably powers the ancillaries like lights, wipers, heated rear window and stereo.

We weren’t allowed to drive the car for long enough to get a real feel for it, unfortunately, due to coming low on the totem pole of people likely to buy one. We find the price a little offputting – “We can’t get round the cost,” admits ECC big cheese David Martell, wishing that the government’s promised £5,000 subsidy were available right now. It may help if you’re buying on the company tab or with the public purse, and where there are tax breaks and writedowns and PR spinoffs and things to ease the invoice through. Martell hopes to shift 500 in the next 12 months and several thousand the year after, in the UK, Spain and France. We worry that 500 might be a bit optimistic.

We liked the car, though. We wish it were a bit faster off the line, and if we’re brutally honest we’d prefer it based on a Toyota Aygo. Yes, the C1 and Aygo are the same under the skin, but it’s the Citroen’s skin – well, its nose – that reminds us of a pig. And in a swine-fever-gripped world, snouty is not a good look.