Morgan's clean break

Zero-emissions motoring — the holy grail of automotive engineering — has a new and unlikely ally in a manufacturer more commonly associated with the throaty roar of a combustion engine, the thrill of the open road and a production process that harks back to the golden era of British sports car manufacture.

At the current Geneva motor show, the UK’s Morgan Motor Company helped shatter its reputation as an old-fashioned maker of old-fashioned vehicles when it launched the LifeCar: a fuel-cell-powered concept car that does 0-60mph in seven seconds, has an estimated range of 200 miles (322km) weighs just 700kg and emits nothing more offensive than a few drops of water.

In a package claimed to be three times more energy-efficient than any other vehicle of its type, the car uses a fuel cell to power four separate electric wheel-motors. The fuel cell is backed up by a series of ultracapacitors that are charged by a regenerative braking system and release their energy when the car is accelerating. This enables the use of a much smaller fuel cell than is traditionally regarded as necessary.

Based on the Morgan Aero Eight, the vehicle is the result of a £1.9m, 30-month project funded jointly by the government and a consortium that includes Morgan, Qinetiq, and industrial gas specialist BOC Linde.

While many visitors might have been surprised to see the company championing fuel cells Matthew Parkin, marketing director, said LifeCar is not the radical departure some have suggested. ‘We have a bit of an issue in terms of how we are perceived,’ he told The Engineer. ‘People think we’re old-fashioned, bumbling and very traditional and yet we make an Aero Eight — the first all-aluminium car in the world, with the most sophisticated ABS system you can get. There’s a lot of technology in our cars that we’re not really recognised for.’

LifeCar dovetails neatly with this philosophy. And, with the other consortium members, Morgan is using lessons learned during the project elsewhere in the business. ‘It drives forward the knowledge in our design and development department,’ said managing director Charles Morgan. ‘It means that we’re collaborating with some interesting new partners outside of the conventional motor industry. It forces us, for example, to think how we can make the car even lighter than it is at the moment.’

Though the project is a collaborative effort involving multiple partners it is the brainchild of one person — Hugo Spowers, a motorsport engineer with a passion for zero-emissions vehicles.

According to Spowers, LifeCar represents a fundamental rethink of how a fuel-cell car is developed. ‘The aim was to demonstrate that if you design a car around a fuel cell then you will end up with a very different solution than if you try fitting a fuel cell into a car designed for a petrol engine.’

He added: ‘People don’t popularly perceive just how optimised current automotive technology is around the characteristics of combustion engines.’ He suggested that the cost and power density issues that have held up fuel-cell car development are a result of the industry’s strategy of putting fuel cells in cars designed for something else.