Could a hydrogen-powered car, using an engine based off construction equipment, set a new land speed record? I came to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah this week to find out — and to see how hydrogen-powered vehicles could compete where EVs are dominating in the race to find a replacement for the gas-fueled internal combustion engine.
At the helm was a retired British fighter pilot, Wing Commander Andy Green (OBE), looking every inch the nerves of steel kind of driver you'd want behind the wheel. This was not surprising. Green has done this before. Twenty years ago he set the land speed record for a diesel powered vehicle by shepherding JCB's Dieselmax to over 350 mph. And he was the first and remains the only human to break the sound barrier on the ground in 1997 when he drove the jet-powered ThrustSSC car to 763.035 mph, or Mach 1.02, creating a sonic boom in the process.
There was no sonic boom this week, but there was plenty of drama around a car that pushed the limits of today's hydrogen technology, employing engines derived from JCB's construction equipment to prove what must have seemed like a crazy idea, that a couple of zero-emission engines based on models used in JCB's diggers (or excavators) could send a man across the desert at over 400 miles per hour.
A car built for one purpose
Shimmering like a kid's hot-rod dream, the canary yellow Hydromax is 32 feet long with a single driver's seat centered in its knife-edge chassis. Green was strapped into the cockpit, nestled between two hydrogen-powered combustion engines, one directly in front and one right behind him. In concert, those engines used pressurized hydrogen to deliver roughly 1,600 horsepower and a rather raucous ride.
The biggest advantage hydrogen technology is that the only thing that comes out of the tailpipe is water.
Like a gas combustion engine, in the JCB engines the hydrogen is mixed with oxygen and ignited in the cylinders to power the vehicle. In comparison, hydrogen fuel cell cars, like the Toyota Mirai sedan, use pressurized hydrogen to create a chemical reaction that generates electricity to power electric motors.
The advantage of combustion hydrogen engines, according to JCB, is that it can power the kind of heavy duty construction and agricultural equipment the company makes, something that has eluded battery-powered EVs. (JCB currently has hydrogen powered equipment available in the U.K. and is looking for approval in the U.S.)
The biggest advantage of both hydrogen technologies is that the only thing that comes out of the tailpipe is water.
Out in the desert
The Bonneville Salt Flats are in Utah's Great Salt Lake Desert, the most famous and most forbidding landscape for automotive testing in the world.
"The salt is a very fickle thing," Ryan Ballard, the engineering director at JCB, explained before a test run. As the day progresses and temperatures approach triple digits, the white salt surface absorbs more moisture, making traction trickier and making it more difficult to achieve top speeds.
And there's the wind. Where some roads have deer and moose warning signs, the interstate near the flats has high wind warning signs. Coming into the area, I experienced my first salt storm, with crosswinds buffeting our SUV and putting so much salt into the air it looked like dense fog.
Finally, the salt flats are actually more like salt scabs, rippled and torn and itching to be peeled off. It is anything but flat, as our convoy trailing out across the alabaster expanse demonstrated with bone-rattling intensity as we made our way out to the track.
Our goal: Watch the Hydromax speed past us, glistening in the sun like something out of the pod race on Tatooine in "Star Wars: Episode 1."
'It's about more than just going fast...it's about the future'
Like something from a bygone era where audacious companies and daring young men in wild contraptions competed for world records, the Hydromax project — which took JCB's engineering team took 450 days to design — seems like something of a nostalgic throwback. But the goal was quite the opposite: to demonstrate what's possible in designing zero-emission construction equipment.
"It's about more than just going fast...it's about the future," said Lord Bamford, chairman of his family's construction equipment business, which was founded by his father in 1945. He believes hydrogen can power a green construction future. "This is not a technology that sits in the laboratory," stressed Bamford. "The internal combustion engine can be a solution for the future."
And it's a project that only a successful, single-minded private company could muster the resources to complete.
Multi-ton construction equipment has stubbornly resisted electrification. Dump trucks and front end loaders are simply working with payloads that are too heavy and physical forces that are too great to make current battery operation feasible. And their duty cycles and often remote locations make it impractical to support such mammoth-sized vehicles with an expanded electrical grid. However, hydrogen refueling tanks can be trucked in to support such vehicles, just as diesel is brought in to many worksites today.
The record attempt
Ripping across the desert like a mirage and trailing a plume of white powder, the JCB Hydromax set the world land speed record for a hydrogen powered vehicle by reaching a neck-snapping official top speed of 406.32 mph.
The JCB Hydromax set the world land speed record for a hydrogen powered vehicle by reaching a neck-snapping official top speed of 406.32 mph
The official record was set under the relentless August sun in front of a passel of sweaty journalists and timing officials from FIA, the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, an international governing organization for motor sports.
The 10-mile track Green drove on was a straight-shot course that had been dragged smooth for the attempt.
In order to set a new official record, Green had to drive the car in one direction to record a flying mile at top speed. It began with a push from an SUV to get the Hydromax up to over 50 mph so that Green could drop the clutch into first gear, accelerating up to 230 mph by the first mile marker, and reaching over 410 mph by mile five (the official record is the average of the two flying miles).
It takes about four miles to bring the car to a full stop, including two parachutes which Green packed himself. And then the team had to turn the Hydromax around, replace all four tires, and set it back in the opposite direction to do it again.
Where hydrogen vehicles fit in a world of EVs
There are still massive challenges facing hydrogen vehicles, however. First, there's the sustainability issue. One of the more common ways to produce hydrogen requires systems that use natural gas, which produces its own greenhouse gas emissions and is not energy efficient. Companies like Ryze Power, which supplied the hydrogen for the Hydromax, are working on producing so-called green hydrogen using renewable energy sources, but those efforts are still in their infancy.
The second challenge is the need for a supporting infrastructure. Existing natural gas pipes, for example, cannot be used for hydrogen because its small molecular structure means it can easily leak and escape from lines designed for natural gas. Hydrogen today has to shipped in large pressurized tanks. Still, it can be shipped to filling stations for vehicles in the same manner that gasoline is shipped gas stations today.
Because of some of these challenges, hydrogen isn't likely to become common in consumer vehicles. It's more suited to heavy duty equipment, long-haul trucking, and possibly mass transit buses. Hydrogen powered tractor trailers, for example, aren't range limited, can be refueled in minutes, and can carry full loads without the offset that giant electric batteries demand.
And, according to a spokesperson from Ryze, versus electric buses, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles can run 24/7, are unaffected by cold weather, can complete longer and hillier routes, and don't require the charging times and infrastructure that EV buses need. Hydrogen buses are currently running in the U.K. but these are still very much pilot projects.
In the meantime, JCB is building a multi-million dollar factory in Texas to build telescoping forklifts called telehandlers for the U.S. market...and someday, it hopes, hydrogen powered construction equipment.
After reasserting his status as the world's fastest man, I asked Green what's next — another land speed record? Another high-tech project? Nothing like that for the former fighter pilot, but he is planning another demonstration of zero emission sustainability: He's going to sail away on his sloop for some much-needed R&R.
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