LATEST ON HYDROGEN CARS

NamX – a Franco-Moroccan outfit we’re frankly astonished you haven’t heard of already – has tasked Pininfarina with all that pencils and clay models malarkey for its big idea: a fuel cell vehicle (available with either 300bhp or 500bhp) with a fixed hydrogen tank, as well as six removable and replaceable hydrogen ‘capsules’.
With the tank and capsules full, the NamX HUV can manage 800km before needing a fresh hit of gas. However, if you can’t get to a hydrogen filling station, you can run on the six capsules alone, which gives you 300km of range.

The real innovation here then is NamX’s distribution pods – a honeycomb cabinet-type-thing that holds the capsules, costs just £5k for a small one and around £20k for a big one (whereas it costs anywhere from £1m to £5m to build a hydrogen filling station from scratch), and can be placed anywhere from fuel station forecourts to supermarket car parks. There’s only a handful of H2 filling stations anywhere at the moment, and it’s this lack of infrastructure, despite the fuel cell tech being mature, that’s ultimately strangling demand. NamX may have solved this in one fell swoop

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