Reducing emissions to nothing more harmless than water vapour, the all-British affair will use a unique approach to tackle the weight, design and market issues so restrictive for successful fuel cell powered cars by adapting the car to fuel cell technology rather than the cell to the car.

The team hope to have a prototype based on the classic sleek lines of the Morgan Aero Eight within two years and a roadworthy efficient high performance fuel cell sports car after two and a half years.

The Department of Trade and Industry will provide approximately half the £1.9 million needed to develop the LIFECar.

The rest of the funding will come from the partnership behind the car, made up of legendary British sports car manufacturer, the Morgan Motor Company, Cranfield University, University of Oxford, QinetiQ, BOC and OSCar Automotive.

Although the project was officially launched only days ago, it really began almost three years ago when Hugo Spowers of OSCar had a conversation with Charles Morgan, corporate strategy director of the Morgan Motor Company.

Professor of Life Cycle Engineering at Cranfield, Stephen Evans, and others like Hugo Spowers of OSCar have been working on it since the beginning of 2002.

Spowers said: “This project is the first fruit of a great deal of work on the whole system design of fuel cell powered vehicles.

“We hope to be able to demonstrate that the perceived barriers to the adoption of hydrogen-fuelled motoring, the high costs of fuel cells and hydrogen storage are, if not bogus, much less of a problem than conventionally thought.”

The lightweight element of LIFECar will be crucial to its success.

A composite-bodied, direct-hydrogen fuel cell car, driven by an electric motor in each of the four wheels using regenerative braking to charge a bank of capacitors for re-use later is key.

Prof Evans said: “The primary goal of the project is to prove fuel cells as a source of power for the car and to deliver fantastic efficiency in a reasonable package.

“It is a very unusual way of designing cars because there is no ‘top down’ design when individuals go and do their bit, come back and put it together with the other components.

“We have to make the car very very light, which in turn will enable us to make the fuel cell lighter, which should then help us reduce the weight of the car further. Overall the car will be at three times the efficiency of existing fuel cell cars.”

LIFECar will be powered by a QinetiQ-made fuel cell, which converts hydrogen and oxygen taken from the air around it into electrical energy.

Clean, quiet and economic, the car’s power system will be incredibly efficient, producing significant improvements over current fuel cell prototype vehicles, with the fuel cell powering four separate electric motors, one at each drive wheel.

Regenerative braking and surplus energy will be used to charge ultra-capacitors, which will release their energy when the car is accelerating.

This architecture will allow the car to have a much smaller fuel cell than is conventionally regarded as necessary: it will only be as large as is required to provide cruising speed, approximately 24 kW, as opposed to around 85kW proposed by most competitor systems.

Ian Whiting, business development manager for QinetiQ, said: “LIFECar is about catching the first big wave in the energy revolution, which is set to transform the motoring industry in the same way that the computer industry was transformed by the personal computer decades ago.”

Cranfield’s principal res-ponsibilities are twofold: Cranfield University Systems will provide simulation, on-board computing and control of the fuel-cell hybrid powertrain and is also responsible for analysis of the integrated design process used; it will also be vehicle controller and control algorithm, together with modelling software.

Prof Evans said: “Cran-field University is developing computer simulation models for the main vehicle components such as the fuel cell, the hydrogen storage system and the electrical machine.

“These models will allow University engineers to predict the performance of the vehicle and its environmental impact long before any physical components have been manufactured and tested.

“These models will then be used to develop the sophisticated control software and electronics, which are necessary to integrate and manage the vehicle’s on-board hydrogen and electrical power systems.

“Cranfield University will also be acting as ‘project observer’ to ensure that the design techniques used are made known to others.”

BOC will develop the hydrogen refuelling plant; Morgan will provide the car platform and assemble the final concept car; Oxford is undertaking the design and control of the electric motors; OSCar is responsible for overall system design and architecture; QinetiQ is developing the Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC).