The John Jostins Interview Transcript

First interview with John Jostins (Microcab), via telephone, recorded 15.05.06

CJ: Firstly can I ask a bit about your background, if that’s alright? Obviously, I’ve done a bit of research, and see that you were involved with Formula One and with even the R2D2 models, and that sort of thing. So can I ask you how you got to where you are at the moment?

JJ: Yes. Well, do you mean how did I get to be doing the Microcab?

CJ: Exactly, yes, that sort of thing.

JJ: Um, well, let’s think about this. I mean I’ve worked in motor racing as you’ve pointed out – mostly through the 80s.

CJ: Right.

JJ: For a range of different teams…Group C Cars, Indy Cars, and some Formula One.

CJ: Right.

JJ: So I was kind of into advanced materials – composites and all the rest of it. More on the chassis side.

CJ: That was more your area of expertise was it, on the advanced composite side of things?

JJ: Yeah, that side of things, and I oscillated between working in racing and working in the film industry. Hence the sort of special effects stuff, bits and pieces that I’ve done over the years. And…so I have a lot of experience handling those and designing for those kinds of materials.

CJ: Sure.

JJ: But I didn’t really have a particular interest in ecology. In the 80s it was very much I was aware of issues that were gathering – clouds that were gathering on the horizon, as it were. I live half my time in London, half my time in Coventry. And, when I moved I was kind of around in London a lot in the early 90s, and I just thought to myself: “Crikey, this is a fairly polluted sort of place.” Walking along and around, and cycling in London, I thought this is not very pleasant a lot of the time. And I just thought, from what I knew about automotive and materials and what have you, that we certainly ought to be able to do something better, cleaner but still give ourselves the same kind of level of mobility. That was the challenge. It wasn’t to say that everyone must ride a bicycle, even though I like to ride a bicycle.

I was working on some special effects things in South London and I was having to go there by car…

CJ: That was the Cold Lazarus programme, was it?

JJ: Yeah, that’s right. Dennis Potter – Dennis Potter’s last film. And I found that my commute took about three quarters of an hour or an hour, and it’s only about six or seven miles – and it just really dawned on me that something else would perhaps be a lot better. If you’re going to have that much congestion you might as well have silent non-emitting vehicles that just sit there… Or other methods of making traffic flow more freely, which of course congestion charging and stuff like that are those other methods. But I thought, well, concentrate on air pollution. That’s the one thing that’s coming out the back of these vehicles when they’re standing still. And at the same time I was using my bicycle when I could, and found that I could make very good time.

CJ: Because it’s a lot narrower…

JJ: Slipping by the rows of cars and all that. So the bicycle kept coming up – and then I was looking at weight. I mean, weight in motor racing is crucial. Weight down is fundamental, and, of course, power up. And then power to weight ratio is very high and so you scoot along very nicely. Well, I thought actually I’m scooting along quite nicely on my 25 kilo bicycle. The car is much, much heavier, obviously; the bicycle’s lighter than the occupant, the car’s a lot heavier than the occupant – is there somewhere, some way we could bridge that? So I was looking at power to weight all the time, and this whole kind of exercise has been based on extreme light-weightness, but coupled with low power, modest power and modest speed. And zero emissions. So I began to think about all those things rather than thinking about out and out top speed, as you do with racing vehicles. I was thinking about out and out zero emissions performance using that lightweightedness construction.

CJ: Presumably within an urban environment on that basis?

JJ: Yes, yes, only within the urban environment… I mean I saw that the place where the car was at its worst and its least efficient was in the urban situation.

CJ: Yeah.

JJ: And I would agree that if you’ve got five people and you’re going to go Cornwall or Scotland or the South of France then the car’s pretty good. You know, so it’s not a kind of – I never took an anti-car stance on this; it is, it was, just about alternatives.

CJ: Right.

JJ: And I experimented with solar power, battery power, pedal power, um, all kinds of configurations between those three things. And then joined the fuel cell club with our first prototype – which is not the current vehicle but an earlier one, a three-wheeler, which is our first fuel cell. And that one stands in a Bugatti lab at the moment in Coventry. So that’s there, and also the most recent prototype will be back there tomorrow. From Scotland, where it’s been on test at the National Engineering laboratory – that’s been a very useful program as well. So that was how it happened. It was driven by a pretty sort of basic kind of “God, the air quality is terrible, isn’t it? Perhaps it’s now 1995, or whatever – does it have to be like this?” And that was the main driving force.

Of course, since then it’s been, well, ten years really – everything’s changed. The focus on ecology, global warming, etc, has become massive while I’ve been doing this project, so obviously where I’ve stood pretty much to the leftfield of it all I think I’m now quite mainstream.

CJ: Yes – you’ve sort of moved to the middle, I suppose.

JJ: Yes. I’m certainly gradually getting there, anyway. And that includes the design as well, I suppose. They have been more radical than the current design but we decided that to… If you’re too radical you’ll be interesting to lots of people. But if you’re really interested in actually swaying the mainstream people into an alternative you can’t be too radical. They don’t want to touch it.

CJ: Does that explain the move from three to four wheels? For example. Or was that driven by another factor?

JJ: It was driven really by interior space. One of the variants of this vehicle is a taxi, obviously, and taxis need to be accessible to all, and that includes someone who is permanently in a wheelchair. So we then developed this very large flat floor which we’ve got. But we found that with the three wheels – which means really we had a central driving position – [the driving position] was taking up all the space for manoeuvring in with a wheelchair. So, we tucked our wheel over, and then logically, once we’d got that extra width we wanted four wheels rather than three because of stability.

CJ: So ideally, would you produce both variants? Because the three wheeled one gives you, sort of, more manoeuvrability in the city because it’s narrower?

JJ: Yes, the idea is to go back to the three once we’ve got a bit further on with this four-wheeler.

CJ: Ah right, I see.

JJ: And also we’re looking at a number of other variants. A freight variant, a personal use kind of commuter one…

CJ: A sort of single occupant sort of thing…?

JJ: Yes, all kinds of other future projects. Now we’ve got the technology – we’ve got the fuel cell in there, we’ve got the hydrogen storage tank in there, and we can see that hydrogen as a fuel is developing, and people will start putting it out on the street. So using our platform and our drivetrain, we can go further forwards and do a number of other things with it. It’s exciting to say we want to have a roster of vehicles, rather than just one.

CJ: Can I just ask about the technology itself – the fuel cell technology?

JJ: Yes.

CJ: So for, er, a sort of more average audience, how would you explain the way that that works? I mean, what sort of problems does working with hydrogen give you? Where do you get it from? Why hydrogen over other forms of power supply, I mean, does it, because it gives you the very flat floor, or just because it’s so ecologically friendly?

JJ: Well, a fuel cell. The sorts of fuel cell we use they use hydrogen anyway – so let’s start with the fuel cell. The fuel cell is a unit which basically joins together at a molecular level hydrogen and oxygen taken from water.

CJ: Right, and that gives you energy, does it…?

JJ: It gives you electric current.

CJ: Ah, right, ok.

JJ: Each molecule joined together releases an electron and you gather all those up and you’ve got an electric current. So you take hydrogen from a tank and oxygen from the air – so you don’t need oxygen tanks you just need a hydrogen tank. And that electric power is then used to drive an electric drive powertrain – which is a more conventional set up.

CJ: But still allows you presumably to be very compact, and give you a very flat floor…

JJ: Yeah, the drive train components are considerably smaller than a normal internal combustion engine set up.

CJ: Is that because of the low power?

JJ: Well, [with] an electric motor the power density is much greater than a piston engine, because piston engines you’ve got all the crankshafts, you’ve got everything moving up and down. All you’ve got is a rotor in an electric motor and that’s it. So you can get incredible power out of very small packages – so that’s the first thing. Secondly, you can put it in a number of different places. You don’t have to put it in the front, under a bonnet, for instance; it can be tucked away lower, or even it can be divided into parts and put into the wheels.

CJ: Sure.

JJ: There are many ways of doing that. The fuel cell itself is a fairly small box, again. There are stacks in the fuel cell cabinet, and they can be nested away as well. We’ve got a fairly box-like structure because, just to get it in and out for swapping and repair, and what have you, but in the end it could be much more integrated into chassis.

CJ: Right.

JJ: You’ve still got a tank. So your tank is perhaps not as big as a petrol tank would be on a conventional car, but it’s still a fairly large item. And that takes compressed hydrogen gas. Not cryogenically frozen but just compressed. That’s what you’ve got on there, and you’ve got an element of battery to store current, particularly from regen braking. You’ve got to have somewhere to put it, you can’t just hold electricity in a bucket, you’ve got to put in something and batteries are the something. There are other ways – we are looking at other things as well, like super-capacitors.

What we decided to do with the second prototype – the first prototype was all designed and built from individual things that we made ourselves. This next prototype we’ve used a lot more off-the-shelf. Because we realised that if you want to replicate this it’s no good trying to design everything on a vehicle, you’ve got too much to deal with. There’s enough new technology on there to not to have to want to have to design our own wheels, or our own motors, or our own everything else. So there’re a lot more off-the-shelf components in it.

CJ: Is that the yellow prototype, that one?

JJ: That’s the yellow prototype, yes. Have you got a picture of it?

CJ: Yeah, I’ve seen it in fact, I think.

JJ: You’ve seen the real thing – right, ok.

CJ: How many are there? Is that the third one?

JJ: That’s the forth prototype, but not of the four-wheeler – that’s the total prototypes we’ve had. It’s the only one of the four-wheelers at the moment.

CJ: So the other three have been three-wheelers…?

JJ: We expect to have some more coming later this year…for pilot schemes.

CJ: So, oh, there is actually…how far along’s that progressing? Because one of my other questions is, obviously, how close to reality are we with this sort of vehicle?

JJ: Well, we’ve got locations in the Midlands, in London, and in the North East, where we’re talking to organisations about putting vehicles into pilot schemes.

CJ: Right…

JJ: And these numbers vary from between sort of five and 35 vehicles – depending on which location. So in total we may have between 20 and 50 vehicles out in service later this year as we go into next year, and through next year.

CJ: Right…

JJ: So that’s kind of…that’s what we are aiming to do. We’re gradually closing these orders down but I can’t give you any more details than that or it might jeopardise negotiations. But these are very real situations. They’re not pie-in-the-sky. These are people that either have already got hydrogen in place or are putting it in…and that’s our only real issue, beyond a place to have a maintenance facility in each location but that’s again not a big deal. They’re simple to maintain, these vehicles – much less complex than a conventional vehicle.

CJ: Presumably because they’re modular and the electronic [sic] drive train and so on allows you to replace parts quite easily, does it?

JJ: Yeah, that’s right. And you’ve got no oil to change. You haven’t got, you know, hot components like exhaust pipes to worry about. You haven’t got generators coming off engines and pumps – you’ve got no pumps. You’ve just got a lot less stuff. You haven’t got spark plugs to change, you haven’t got a water cooling system to worry about, and et cetera. It just hasn’t got all those things.

CJ: Sure, so presumably the limiting factor – theoretically at least – is simply the hydrogen infrastructure, and I suppose if they’re urban based that becomes less of a problem because you can set up a sort of a home for them, I suppose…?

JJ: That’s it. That was the reason for tackling the urban situation. Or, the reason for tackling the urban situation was firstly it was the worst situation for pollution; and secondly, yes, you’ve got lots of vehicles used in urban situations which never really leave the urban arena. And therefore perfect just for pootling back and forth and doing their work, and getting filled up, and so on. And perhaps not going more than a five mile radius from base.

CJ: Sure.

JJ: And there’s plenty of work like that for little vehicles in cities – both freight and people moving. And the sorts of these pilots schemes, one is, I think, going to be an entirely freight based one, and the others will be more like…say if there was a large hospital trust and perhaps a university campus linked together, and they’ve got to deliver mail, or deliver other things, or people, across those several miles of campus – whatever that might be.

CJ: Sure.

JJ: It could be a military installation, it could a nature reserve. It could be anything like that. Or an urban centre. And I think in the future we’ll have more vehicles which do specific jobs, and don’t expect to be able to go and do everything from motorways to cities. It’s happening in London, there’s, you know, the small G-wiz electric car – do you know that one?

CJ: Yes, yes – I’m aware of that, yeah.

JJ: They’ve sold quite a few of those already. You see them on the streets in London, so that’s a sign that the general public are quite willing to get into something quite different now, just because – well, in that case it saves them congestion charge. Which at £8 a day is £2000 a year.

CJ: Absolutely.

JJ: So there’s a strong business case for – and of course, no road tax – so you’re already making over £2000 if you use that for commuting into London.

CJ: So are they intended as a sort of private ownership prospect, or as some sort of modular community vehicle in that sense. From some of the examples you’re…

JJ: What, the Microcab?

CJ: Yeah. From the example you’ve given they could be either, I suppose?

JJ: Exactly. As we are – that’s what we’re testing the water on at the moment. They’ve certainly been designed as a taxi type vehicle, perhaps as either a public service or a council based thing, or a work fleet where they do specific jobs. But I’ve had a lot of interest from individuals saying, actually, I could use one of those. And so it’s got a lot of potential on all those fronts.

CJ: As far as you’re aware, are you the first British hydrogen car? I mean, is there anything similar at all to you anywhere for that matter? Or, I mean, how revolutionary do you feel that it is?

JJ: I think that there’s lots of talk of these things but that there are very few that you can actually get in and drive. I shall be driving mine this week, and I’ve been driving it since last summer, so, you know, I think that we’ve managed to get ourselves in a fairly unique position. In that we do have a vehicle which is almost on the road as it were, and we can replicate, and we can start getting out to other people.

And yeah, I think because I started early with the whole ecological thing I was slightly ahead. I mean the danger is, of course, that the catching up will happen very quickly! Obviously the major manufacturers, Ford, and Mercedes, and Toyota, and Honda, and Fiat, and so on, have got their fuel cell vehicles somewhere. They’re trying them out, and they’re, you know, they claim they’ve made a hundred or whatever and they’ve given them to people to try. But we haven’t seen them. I mean I’ve seen the Mercedes A-Class – when we were on Trafalgar Square last, autumn – October – there were only two fuel cell vehicles there: the Microcab and the Mercedes A-Class fuel cell. And that was it. So…

CJ: There’s nothing else in the UK at all, is there, presumably?

JJ: No. There are rumours of a number of things but that’s it…so I would say definitely UK-wise it’s a pioneering project. And we hope to continue to forge ahead. And having given up on the engine – I think most manufacturers are saying, well, well we can’t give on the engine, because what are we going to sell to people? I’m not in that situation. Not being a manufacturer, I haven’t got a manufacturing base to maintain. It’s just a question of starting fresh.

CJ: Can I just ask who else is involved, and what sort of other interest you have had? Is it something you’re going to do entirely yourself…I mean, who’s funding it, is there interest from other manufacturers, and that sort of thing?

JJ: Well I had, DTI [Department of Trade and Industry] money for the three-wheeled fuel cell prototype, and I’ve had a DTI grant again for the yellow one. Coventry University is a stake holder now in the business. So they’ve put in in return for equity. And there’s a racing company – well, the first racing company was called Piper Design. They were in Sheppard’s Bush, in London. And now we’re working with Delta Motorsport Design, who are at Silverstone. And they are some of the same people but moved to another company. So we’ve always had a racing expertise on the chassis and drive train.

CJ: Almost like a pedigree – a racing pedigree?

JJ: Well that’s it. We very much to have that. I mean that’s my background as well.

CJ: Absolutely.

JJ: And we try to take what we can and keep the costs down. Take the exotic stuff and try and take the cost out of it – it’s a difficult one, but that’s what we try to do. And that’s the philosophy here: use exotic materials for ecological benefit. Rather than just to put them on super cars, you know?

CJ: How revolutionary does that make the design? Is it just the materials, or is it the actual construction of the car. I understand that it’s extremely lightweight for what it is, which is quite difficult to achieve with a fuel cell vehicle…

JJ: It is difficult to achieve, yes. The current prototype actually is a bit of a mule really – but to get to where we want to be we will be using certain elements of carbon fibre, composites, and then the alloys and aluminiums as well. To get the weight down. But it’s a question of designing with those materials in mind; it’s not just a case of just using those materials, you’ve got to design as well. And so it is a tough one that, to get down to weights that we’re talking about, and to keep stiffness, and so on. But that’s where we come from. That’s the heritage. So we should be able to do it – I think we’re getting there gradually.

CJ: How does this impact on the cost of the vehicles? Presumably they’re going to have to be relatively affordable to appeal to people, I’m assuming…?

JJ: That’s right – we’ve got to talk about a vehicle that’s less than £10,000.

CJ: Right!

JJ: You know, in the same price as other small vehicles. So, yeah, it’s a very tough one, but we are working hard on doing it. There are ways of looking at composite materials, perhaps reducing the proportion of carbon in there and increasing the proportion of another fibre, to give you the stiffness you require without all the cost.

And then to try and take the labour out, because the labour’s the other thing. So that’s a question of trying to simplify everything to as few parts as possible. And again that’s a design issue – that’s getting it designed, so that it can be built simply and quickly.

I see the future of these kinds of vehicles as being a very big future, where a vehicle is sort of clipped together, more like the way that pcs are made

CJ: Ah, right! I see…

JJ: And that’s the metaphor.

CJ: Sort of modular.

JJ: And at the same time, the whole energy structure – if you’ve got a vehicle that essentially produces electricity, it is a mobile power station. But also it can plug into the grid. You can plug into other electric energy systems. So it can bypass the fossil fuel legacy, because in the end we can generate electricity from tidal or wind or solar or whatever combination we have in the future.

CJ: Sure.

JJ: And it plugs into the idea of a distributed grid, rather than a centralised power generation – where every building in a city is its own little power station. The vehicles run off that basis. So that combined with constructing vehicles more like a pc where you’ve got a motherboard, a motor, some battery pack, and you sort of clip it all together, and the distributed energy grid – when you look at it in all those terms, it is incredibly revolutionary.

CJ: Yes!

JJ: It’s a lot to do in one go. But those, those are all the philosophies behind it. They’re not immediately apparent looking at the vehicle because it’s become quite mainstream looking, so that we can become more marketable.

CJ: Does the hydrogen itself present a problem in terms of where you get it from, or is it something that, with the renewable energy sources of the future you become less reliant on the fossil fuel powered electricity grid?

JJ: Well, the hydrogen comes from natural gas at the moment. But we’ve got a petrol equivalent of about 150 miles per gallon for this vehicle.

CJ: So it works out pretty economical, ecological…

JJ: Well, yes, that’s right, because you’re about a third or a quarter of what other vehicles would use doing the same thing. So, you know, there is that. But, of course London’s being very revolutionary in its thinking in terms of the future and energy and so on, and I’ve had conversations with some of the people that are developing schemes in London – first of all to put hydrogen in a lot of places so you’ve got it, but secondly to generate that hydrogen from waste, what’s called Syngas.

CJ: Right, yes – I was reading about something similar to that just recently, actually...

JJ: Well that is not just a pie in the sky idea – that is coming. So there will be hydrogen points set up in London, and those will be fed by hydrogen from waste. So then you are getting somewhere when you start getting all that together.

CJ: How much of does the infrastructure present, now? I mean is it something that is realistically attainable in a short period of time? From what you’re saying, it tends to suggest that it is?

JJ: No, ah, it’ll probably follow the path of LPG. You know that we didn’t have much of that – we’re now ok. France’s got a lot of it, et cetera. So we’re going to move more and more to gases – in India they’re using compressed natural gas, for instance, for vehicles. We use LPG and a number of other gases, and we’re going to move more towards a gas powered fleet across the board, I’d say.

CJ: So, does it present and sort of safety issues we should be worried about, or…?

JJ: Yeah, it’s dangerous stuff, you know – all these fuels are flammable, aren’t they? It’s no more or less flammable than other fuels.

CJ: It is something that can be easily contained, presumably?

JJ: Well you can’t get a hydrogen nozzle and squirt hydrogen into the air like you can with petrol [laughs]. It locks onto the filler cap and then you stand back and press a button, and only when all the safety things are actually in place does it actually fill. And secondly, we’ve got a carbon composite tank on there which is ‘gunfire resistant’, as it says on the label; and we’ve got hydrogen sensors on the vehicle which sniff hydrogen – if there’s any leakage, [they] shut everything down. So, we have technology for safety. I mean hydrogen’s being used all over the world – not necessarily in vehicles, but in all kinds of other usages. It’s used regularly as a gas, it’s not just suddenly a new thing. As you know, there were the airships, so it’s been around as a gas for donkey’s years.

CJ: Sure!

JJ: I wouldn’t put it in a canvas bag though, like the Hindenburg, and paint it with an aluminium oxide paint…

CJ: Exactly, that was the problem wasn’t it…

JJ: It was the problem, yeah! Also, I do like the idea of that huge quantity of hydrogen [joking]: I mean, our full tank is 610 grams.

CJ: And it isn’t made out of a solid version of rocket fuel, for example, which is apparently what the problem was with the Zeppelins, wasn’t it?

JJ: Yes, that’s right. Safety is very, very important, and we take it very seriously.

CJ: Have you had any issues with it at all?

JJ: No, no. I use it all the time and don’t have a problem at all, no. It’s not high pressure when it goes to the fuel cell. It’s high pressure in the tank, but it’s only at three bar pressure [to the fuel cell], which is about the same pressure as your ordinary kind of home gas pressure. So you don’t get a massive burst of it, even if you open a hosewhen you shouldn’t – not that I’ve ever done that.

CJ: So it’s just at high pressure in the tank?

JJ: Yes.

CJ: What sort of pressure is it at in the tank?

JJ: 350 bar.

CJ: 350? Crikey…

JJ: Yes. But they are talking about 700 bar…

CJ: Oh. Right.

JJ: So you can double your range just by doubling the pressure, you see. We get a hundred miles on our 350 bar tank, but if we could have a 700 bar we’d have two hundred miles, so…

CJ: Sure.

JJ: But a hundred miles is a day’s work for a taxi, so that was kind of our, our, why we came to that number.

CJ: So that was engineered in from the start, was it, the hundred miles?

JJ: Yeah, right from the start. We didn’t want people to have working vehicles and have to go and fill up half way through the day.

CJ: The conference and journal is about the future of the British car industry, so where do you feel the Microcab fits in? And what does it mean for Coventry?

JJ: I think there’s a massive gap between what we’re doing, and the mainstream car industry. And that gap needs to be bridged.

CJ: Right.

JJ: In a sense that the mainstream car industry, the Rovers, just died on us, as it were. Were working with old models which they tried to go on year in year out with very little changes to keep the cost out. We on the other hand are all R&D, no production – yet. And therefore, we can turn on a sixpence. If we decide tomorrow to make a different sort of vehicle we will see next spring. And I think some that, the ability that we’ve got in the small companies needs to somehow be bridged to the larger companies, so that they can have the input of new design, new thinking – whether that be styling, or ecological drivetrains, or whatever it is. And that we should be the foremost country in the world at this. We’ve got the best motor racing, and the best sort of special vehicles expertise. We also had a motor industry – whether we’ve still got one or not is debateable – but we ought to be the foremost, if we could join those two up. But it’s almost been impossible to do. The mentality here’s been wrong.

CJ: This goes back to the modular design concept that you’re talking about presumably – that gives you the ability to change things at a whim?

JJ: It’s not so much that, it’s small companies. Small companies are driven in a very different way to large ones. Large ones have to say, “Ah, we’ll only make that if we can sell 50,000 of them.” So that immediately would say they wouldn’t make what we’re making – any of the ones I’ve made. All our program would have been cancelled in a large company. Do you see what I’m saying?

CJ: Yes, absolutely.

JJ: But because I’m driving it forwards, from a personal perspective, then I can decide to do these things. And if we can sell 500 a year we’ve made a big success. You know? Whereas they want 50,000 a year because that’s the cost of their production line.

CJ: So, when you say success, would you make money from 500 a year, if you can tell me that sort of thing, or would it literally be a success in terms of you’re solving urban congestion problems and congestion problems – or would it be both?

JJ: Both. I mean, I think 500 is a bit small to make any money on, but perhaps a thousand or 1,500 is quite a nice business. So, you know, those are our areas, that’s what we’re aiming for – certainly 1500 vehicles a year, I would say that would be a success across all fronts.

If we could get a vehicle out there at a reasonable price and make that many, then we would have a nice business going. Where, as I say, a bigger company doesn’t have that at all. They don’t want to set up a production line unless they can make huge numbers of vehicles and sell them. That’s the difference – so somehow we have to join up these mentalities, we have to say big manufacturing’s got to be a lot more flexible, and they’ve also got to somehow perhaps have a satellite of small companies around them that produce ideas that they can then take on. Rather than saying, oh well, to design a new vehicle is £6million, so we haven’t got that budget, so we can’t do it. We’ve designed a new vehicle on half a million pounds. Which is quite a different budget.

CJ: So is this something you intend to keep going yourself, or would you be looking for, sort of, further interest from manufacturers and becoming a sort of satellite company as you suggest?

JJ: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I’m an R&D person: I’m about ideas. I’ve got a huge catalogue of ideas I’d like to move on to, but I’ve decided to push this one right to winning, you know, somewhere along the way. But, no, I think that, we need a production company to come along and take this off us, and I need to get on with further ideas. And do that – I’m very happy in the R&D, I really enjoy doing this.

CJ: You need to someone to take it on from you…

JJ: Yes, something like that. We’re trying to meet small local companies to do our prototype and our demonstrator vehicles, but we’ll need someone to hook up with to make the larger numbers. I’m not going to be moving into production…I haven’t got those skills.

CJ: So, does Coventry fit into this at all? I mean there’s Coventry University is a big link to it, but would it be…?

JJ: Coventry University’s been very good – I mean, the facilities that they’ve got, what’s called the Bugatti Building, and a full size vehicle design studio, which no other university or college has got really, anywhere. So, having that facility has been a great bonus, and also having the skills and knowledge of the staff and the whole kind of student activity going around it, is a great, what’s the word, uh, critical mass of automotive thinking there. Which is very good to be associated with, we’re able to dip into that. Coventry certainly on that side. The most forward looking city, in terms of ecology and so on, is London – by far. I can’t say that there’s necessarily anything other than very conservative thinking in the motor industry generally.

CJ: Sure.

JJ: But funnily enough, everyone’s always excited by the new and the interesting and the unusual, aren’t they? But whether they’re willing to go ahead and produce it, put it out on the street is another matter.

ENDS

Final Magazine Version: Sidebars

Of Trials and Variants

“We’ve got locations in the Midlands, in London, and in the North East,” says Jostins, “where we’re talking to organisations about putting vehicles into pilot schemes. And these numbers vary from between five and 35 vehicles – depending on which location. So in total we may have between 20 and 50 vehicles out in service later this year.”

He is unwilling to give specific details, for fear of jeopardising negotiations, but does allow that one possibility involves a major coffee outlet. Since the fuel cell generates electricity, this version may be more than just a runabout – there are talks of fitting coffee machines into the boot space, and using the car’s own power system to make hot drinks. Future partners may be cities like Southampton and Brighton – forward-looking communities where the cars could be used to transport people around the beachfront.

Other variants of the Microcab include the H3 (the number refers to the wheels, rather than series – “H2 being hydrogen” as Jostins points out), which predates the H4, and was constructed using a full carbon-fibre monocoque, a technique used for Formula One cars. The plan is to revisit the three-wheeler, very much a motorised rickshaw, once the H4 is up and running successfully. Other versions may include a single-occupant commuter vehicle.

“I think in the future,” says Jostins, “we’ll have more vehicles which do specific jobs, and don’t expect to be able to go and do everything from motorways to cities. It’s happening in London, there’s the small G-wiz electric car. They’ve sold quite a few of those already. You see them on the streets in London, so that’s a sign that the general public are quite willing to get into something quite different now, just because – well, in that case it saves them congestion charge, which at £8 a day is £2000 a year. So there’s a strong business case for it – and of course, no road tax. So you’re already making over £2000 if you use that for commuting into London.”

Hydrogen – Technology and Safety

“The fuel cell is a unit which basically joins together at a molecular level hydrogen and oxygen,” explains Jostins. “Each molecule joined together releases an electron and you gather all those up and you’ve got an electric current. So you take hydrogen from a tank and oxygen from the air – so you don’t need oxygen tanks you just need a hydrogen tank. And that electric power is then used to drive an electric powertrain.”

Pressure inside the hydrogen tank is currently at 350 bar (though 700 is being discussed – which would double the Microcab’s range). But hold on a moment: pressurised gas? Pressurised hydrogen gas? Isn’t that the stuff the Hindenburg was filled with when it blew up? Well, yes, it is, but the Microcab’s tank is carbon composite – “ ‘gunfire

resistant’, as it says on the label” – and not “a canvas bag”. Plus the hydrogen is only at three bar during its journey to the fuel cell. To give you some perspective, three bar is about the same as your household gas supply – “so you don’t get a massive burst of it, even if you open a hose when you shouldn’t – not that I’ve ever done that.”

Jostins laughs, but obviously the safety aspect is taken very, very seriously. The vehicle is covered with hydrogen sensors – any leakage and everything is immediately shut down. The gas itself is already in service around the world, and although its use in cars is currently unconventional, it can be found powering buses. The refuelling process is arguably safer than with petrol or diesel – the nozzle locks onto the filler, and only starts pumping gas once all the safety devices have engaged. “You can’t get a hydrogen nozzle and squirt hydrogen into the air like you can with petrol,” Jostins adds.

Hydrogen is dangerous stuff, but no more so than any other fuel currently used in motor vehicles, and the Microcab is expected to pass all appropriate crash legislation. You might consider the safety concerns regarding hydrogen as more of a psychological barrier, stemming from the Hindenburg airship disaster early in the 20th century. But as history buffs may know, this was less the result of using hydrogen for floatation than it was using aluminium oxide paint on the “canvas bag” – aluminium oxide being a solid state form of rocket fuel.

“Precycling” and “Life Without Oil”

Currently the Microcab is powered by hydrogen derived from Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG), meaning that it’s still reliant on fossil fuels. However, there are already plans to start using Syngas, a substitute created from waste. Jostins is also keen to see the increased use of renewable energy sources, such as wind and tidal power, and points out that since the fuel cell produces electricity, the Microcab could even be used as part of a distribute energy grid.

This is “where every building in a city is its own little power station” rather than being reliant on a centralised power generation structure. Jostins can already point to examples of this, including a farm in Nottingham that has a hydrogen store capable of containing three weeks worth of energy, generated using wind turbines and solar panels.

Given the level of concern that is already evident, you can’t help but wonder about the environmental impact of the Microcab’s manufacturing process. Although materials and methods with a low carbon footprint are a high priority, Jostins has an even more radical response: “Precycling.” The notion here is that people won’t be allowed to buy a Microcab unless they collect and recycle prior to purchase the equivalent amount of say, glass or aluminium, used in the vehicle itself.

The scheme is only a concept at the moment, but it just goes to show – if any more proof were needed – how seriously Jostins takes the idea of ecological motoring.

The BMW Approach

BMW have an alternative vision - the H2R concept car. This has set a hydrogen speed record of 187mph, and accelerates 0-62mph in 6 sec. As opposed to the Microcab, its hydrogen fuelled power plant is an internal combustion engine, rather than a fuel cell. BMW claims that this technology will be available in its 7-series within the decade.

The Magazine and the Conference

Well, last Wednesday was the day of publication - timed to coincide with a conference organised around the magazine's theme: The Future Of The British Car Industry.

Remarkably, all went well. The magazine looks fantastic, thanks in no small part to Phil Perry, a design lecturer here at Coventry University, who helped us put the finished product together. I've put up the front cover, as well as the layout for my article, for you all to inspect for errors.

The conference was also a great success - though I rather feel that this was due to the quality of the guest speakers, rather than ourselves! These included: Steve Cropley, Editor-in-Chief of Autocar, and Haymarket's other motoring publications; Jay Nagley, an industry analyst and Autocar columnist; and Gerard Coyne, regional secretary of the Transport & General Workers Union. There also notable attendees from the PR departments of the BMW Group and Jaguar, as well as Peugeot and PSA.

I'm moving on now to new projects, though this site will remain available to those who might wish to peruse it - although in addition to that, I intend to add the final versions of the sidebars (including a new one on a BMW hydrogen car you haven't seen yet), and the full transcipt of my first interview with John Jostins.

Don't forget to check out my main site, as this is in the process of undergoing a redesign.

InfinityReversed: old and new.

Final Magazine Version: Main Article

[WIth sub-headings added by the editor.]

It’s easy to be cynical about hydrogen as an alternative fuel for motor vehicles. The gas has been the ‘fuel of the future’ since at least the late 1980s. Yet every time we hear about it, hydrogen still seems to be 30 years away – as experts explain the technology simply costs far too much, and is crippled without the necessary supply infrastructure.

But there is a small company in the UK that seriously begs to differ. Microcab is the brainchild of John Jostins, a designer, and part-time lecturer at Coventry University; a background that combines motor racing, the film industry and too much time wasted commuting in London sees
him attempting to bring hydrogen motoring to the masses. Soon – and in a vehicle costing “less than £10,000.”

Consider this implausible? Well perhaps it’s time to start thinking again. The latest Microcab prototype, the H4, has just spent three weeks undergoing evaluation at the National Engineering Laboratory in Scotland – and will be back there again next month. This fully functioning ‘hydrogen car’ uses a fuel cell to deliver the equivalent of 150 miles per gallon, and its only emission is water vapour. The company’s slogan is “Life Without Oil” – and they mean it.

What’s more, if all goes to plan, trials of the Microcab will begin in three separate locations later this year – a development pace that seems frenetic until you realise Jostins has been working on this project for over ten years, potentially making him one of the pioneers of the hydrogen frontier.

While major manufacturers are pursuing limited programmes in other parts of the world, no-one claims to be developing a fuel cell vehicle here in the UK – let alone running a serious multi-car trial.

Egg-shaped and friendly

So, what is the Microcab? The H4 is the fourth prototype, and the first with four wheels. It looks a little like an engorged Smart ForTwo, kind of egg-shaped and friendly. It’s quite tall, and easily accommodates four adults – but what’s most notable about the interior space is how flat the floor is. One of the benefits of having an unconventional drivetrain, this floor area will make wheelchair access a doddle – and this detail is important because, as the name and yellow paint suggest, this small car is conceptualised as a taxi.

This is clever. Think of a taxi, and what springs to mind is a vehicle employed to carry people and/or things over relatively short distances, predominantly in urban areas, often with noisy,
smokey diesel engines. Only rarely are they used for long distances, and their function is convenience rather than luxury. This helps define the principle behind the Microcab – it’s not a multipurpose vehicle, and Jostins hasn’t set out to replace the car; the Microcab is intended solely as an alternative form of inner-city transport – but very clean, very quiet, and very efficient.

Long Term Project

Jostins got started on the project in the early 90s, living and working in London. Never an ecologist, he just couldn’t help noticing that “storm clouds” were gathering. “I found,” he says, “that my commute took about three quarters of an hour or an hour – and it’s only about six or seven miles. It just really dawned on me that something else would perhaps be a lot better. If you’re going to have that much congestion you might as well have silent, non-emitting vehicles that just sit there.”

Jostins had spent the previous decade working with advanced lightweight materials in chassis construction for various forms of motorsport – including Formula One. This, and his habit of riding a bicycle when he could, inevitably meant he started considering what could be done to improve the vehicles around him. “Rather than thinking about out and out top speed, as you do with racing vehicles, I was thinking about out and out zero emissions performance using that lightweight construction.”

Target weight is only 450kg – less than half a Ford Ka – and although Jostins admits this will be “very tough,” especially within the constraints of the £10,000 ideal price, he also says it’s mostly a question of design. An earlier three-wheeled prototype – the H3 – was made from parts manufactured entirely in-house and weighs only 252kg. The H4 was built with off-the-shelf components where possible, helping to keep the material and manufacturing costs down.

Because it’s an urban vehicle, the Microcab doesn’t need to be fast, it just has to keep up with other traffic. Given its “extreme” light weight, this means only a modest amount of power is necessary – perfect for a fuel cell. This combines hydrogen and oxygen in a chemical process,
generating electric current. The current drives the electric motor the Microcab uses as its engine. There are actually fewer moving parts than in a conventional car, making the Microcab easier to maintain.

Not fast but frugal

Maximum speed will be no more than 40mph. This doesn’t exactly sound startling, but because electric motors generate their power almost immediately, the H4’s actually been detuned to make it less responsive. “We were afraid people were going to crash it!” Jostins remarks, adding that most people find the performance surprising; it takes only a slight prod of the accelerator to get the vehicle moving rapidly.

But if that doesn’t stir you, contemplate the economy – the Microcab is incredibly efficient. That headline 150mpg-equivalent figure is powerful, but what’s even more impressive is the claimed 100 mile range – from a tank that contains only 610g of hydrogen, when at the moment it’s priced between $2 and $5 a kilo. Even if the prices go up, through taxation or demand – currently the gas is in surplus – there’s still a long way to go before it starts challenging the cost per mile of petrol or diesel.

The infrastructure is more problematic – there aren’t any filling stations. For the planned trials this isn’t an issue, as in each location the cars will be stored in a single facility providing maintenance and fuel. After that, Jostins is optimistic that hydrogen will follow a similar pattern to LPG. If the demand is there the infrastructure will follow; LPG started slowly but can now be found on forecourts across the country. There is no need for an extensive infrastructure while the emphasis is placed on providing urban solutions, merely centrally located hubs.

Will Jostins and Microcab succeed? Well, the Department of Trade and Industry has backed them, as has Coventry University, while strategic partners include Delta Motorsport Design, and, previously, Piper Design. There’s still work to be done on the cost front, as the H4 prototype is worth about £500,000 – but that figure does include its development. The Microcabs involved in the trials are expected to be in the region of £50,000 each, though this is “acceptable” for such a scheme.

Aim for 1,500 cars a year

Jostins has no ambition to become a full-scale manufacturer – research and design remains his passion. Even if he is determined to take the Microcab as far as it can go, a production partner is ideally needed to take the project on. If the Microcab hits all its targets – including the price – selling only 1,000-1,500 a year would make for “a nice business.” The Vauxhall Corsa, the UK’s top selling supermini, sold over 89,000 units alone last year – Microcab only needs a fraction of that volume for success.

Fundamentally, at this stage the Microcab is about making people think. This is a British company with a fully functioning, hydrogen powered motor vehicle, backed by a very tightly defined idea about what its goals are and how they might be achieved. The project is currently moving at a pace apparently unmatched by any other fuel cell competitor, and it’s led by a man really convinced about the worth of what he is doing.

If the planned trials go ahead later this year, then more mainstream application of this technology may come sooner rather than later – even if Jostins himself believes the hydrogen revolution is still at least five to ten years away. Until then, he says, “it’s a question of finding niches. The Microcab’s not going to challenge the Fiat Punto – at least, not yet.”

The Power of Google

Not a particularly serious post this one, but an amusing aside.

At the beginning of researching this project I set up a Google Alert for a couple of key terms, "Microcab", and "John Jostins". (If you are unsure what a Google Alert is, click here.)

These have been popping up quite regularly in my email inbox - although it seems there are other unrelated people and things that share the name (hardly a surprise), this has been pretty useful.

Can you guess what arrived through this today? Yup, that's right - a Google Alert for this weblog! The internet makes it so much easier for everyone to have their 15 minutes of fame...


Links:

Google Alerts [beta]

SUBBED: Short Version [internal]

More window dressing

To explain, this is in order to make the site less pink...

Window dressing

F3D426 - yellow!

SUBBED: Sidebars

Fixed it! Very little changed here...

Of trials, variants, and niches.

“We’ve got locations in the Midlands, in London, and in the North East,” says Jostins, “where we’re talking to organisations about putting vehicles into pilot schemes. And these numbers vary from between five and 35 vehicles – depending on which location. So in total we may have between 20 and 50 vehicles out in service later this year.”

He is unwilling to give specific details, for fear of jeopardising negotiations, but does allow that one possibility involves a major coffee outlet. Since the fuel cell generates electricity, this version may be more than just a runabout – there are talks of fitting coffee machines into the boot space, and using the car’s own power system to make hot drinks. Future partners may be cities like Southampton and Brighton – forward-looking communities where the cars could be used to transport people around the beachfront.

Other variants of the Microcab include the H3 (the number refers to the wheels, rather than series – “H2 being hydrogen” as Jostins points out), which predates the H4, and was constructed using a full carbon-fibre monocoque, a technique used for Formula One cars. The plan is to revisit the three-wheeler, very much a motorised rickshaw, once the H4 is up and running successfully. Other versions may include a single-occupant commuter vehicle.

“I think in the future,” says Jostins, “we’ll have more vehicles which do specific jobs, and don’t expect to be able to go and do everything from motorways to cities. It’s happening in London, there’s the small G-wiz electric car. They’ve sold quite a few of those already. You see them on the streets in London, so that’s a sign that the general public are quite willing to get into something quite different now, just because – well, in that case it saves them congestion charge. Which at £8 a day is £2000 a year. So there’s a strong business case for it – and of course, no road tax. So you’re already making over £2000 if you use that for commuting into London.”

Hydrogen – technology and safety

Wondering how a fuel cell works?

“The fuel cell is a unit which basically joins together at a molecular level hydrogen and oxygen,” explains Jostins. “Each molecule joined together releases an electron and you gather all those up and you’ve got an electric current. So you take hydrogen from a tank and oxygen from the air – so you don’t need oxygen tanks you just need a hydrogen tank. And that electric power is then used to drive an electric powertrain.”

Pressure inside the hydrogen tank is currently at 350 bar (though 700 is being discussed – which would double the Microcab’s range). But hold on a moment: pressurised gas? Pressurised hydrogen gas? Isn’t that the stuff the Hindenburg was filled with when it blew up?

Well, yes, it is, but the Microcab’s tank is carbon composite – “ ‘gunfire resistant’, as it says on the label” – and not “a canvas bag”. Plus the hydrogen is only at three bar during its journey to the fuel cell. To give you some perspective, three bar is about the same as your household gas supply – “so you don’t get a massive burst of it, even if you open a hose when you shouldn’t – not that I’ve ever done that.”

Jostins laughs, but obviously the safety aspect is taken very, very seriously. The vehicle is covered with hydrogen sensors – any leakage and everything is immediately shut down. The gas itself is already in service around the world, and although its use in cars is currently unconventional, it can be found powering buses. The refuelling process is arguably safer than with petrol or diesel – the nozzle locks onto the filler, and only starts pumping gas once all the safety devices have engaged. “You can’t get a hydrogen nozzle and squirt hydrogen into the air like you can with petrol,” Jostins adds.

Hydrogen is dangerous stuff, but no more so than any other fuel currently used in motor vehicles, and the Microcab is expected to pass all appropriate crash legislation. You might consider the safety concerns regarding hydrogen as more of a psychological barrier, stemming from the Hindenburg airship disaster early in the 20^th century. But as history buffs may know, this was less the result of using hydrogen for floatation than it was using aluminium oxide paint on the “canvas bag” – aluminium oxide being a solid state form of rocket fuel.

“Precycling” and “Life Without Oil”

Currently the Microcab is powered by hydrogen derived from Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG), meaning that it’s still reliant on fossil fuels. However, there are already plans to start using Syngas, a substitute created from waste. Jostins is also keen to see the increased use of renewable energy sources, such as wind and tidal power, and points out that since the fuel cell produces electricity, the Microcab could even be used as part of a distribute energy grid.

This is “where every building in a city is its own little power station” rather than being reliant on a centralised power generation structure. Jostins can already point to examples of this, including a farm in Nottingham that has a hydrogen store capable of containing three weeks worth of energy, generated using wind turbines and solar panels.

Given the level of concern that is already evident, you can’t help but wonder about the environmental impact of the Microcab’s manufacturing process. Although materials and methods with a low carbon footprint are a high priority, Jostins has an even more radical response: “Precycling.” The notion here is that people won’t be allowed to buy a Microcab unless they collect and recycle prior to purchase the equivalent amount of say, glass, or aluminium, used in the vehicle itself.

The scheme is only a concept at the moment, but it just goes to show – if any more proof were needed – how seriously Jostins takes the idea of ecological motoring.

Links:

SUBBED: Short Version [internal]