Automotive entrepreneur Gordon Murray has struck a new deal to investigate building an affordable fuel cell research vehicle over the next 12 months.
Murray will partner a UK based company, ACAL Energy, that has found a way to build fuel cells without platinum, an important way of reducing costs.
Murray's Guildford-based company, Gordon Murray Design, is the lead partner in the project which will attract funding of about £1 million from the Technology Strategy Board to million and will combine research findings from 14 other TSB-backed companies. Success with this, the TSB says, could lead to another round of investment
Murray is not yet revealing details the new car's mechanical layout but confirms it will use his i-Stream construction process that ditches stamped steel panels from a car's monocoque in favour of a rigid structure of simple tubes and bonded-in composite panels.
The highly innovative process was developed for Murray's tiny T25 petrol and T27 rear-engined electric city cars but the new fuel cell car would probably be larger than T25 and T27, and have its relatively bulky fuel cell stack in the nose.
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