Under two weeks to go until the unveiling of the car at Somerset House and things are coming together in fits and starts!  Our vehicle is being assembled in the workshop of Alan Docking Racing at Silverstone.  In the last two weeks, the build has almost been completed.  The remaining cosmetic elements are waiting on the powertrain stuff - which is what really matters in this car.  This consists of finalising the complex wiring and commissioning the powertrain systems - not a trivial process when every little actor in the play has to recognise, understand and cooperate with every other.

It has been an interesting couple of months.  As we prepare to share our concept of sustainable transport with the world, there has been a lot about the car industry in the press, with the old industry in meltdown and the government launching various initiatives, including subsidies for electric vehicles. The irrational aspect of this is that all governments claim to be technology-neutral with goals of energy efficiency and carbon reduction, yet this subsidy is technology-specific and is not even remotely coupled to either objective; battery-electric SUVs can easily exceed 300 g/km in CO2 emissions, so are both inefficient and high carbon, yet would be eligible for a £5,000 subsidy!

There is little evidence of any serious search for solutions that will work in the medium and long term - it is all about quick fixes, understandably given the tyranny of electoral cycles and quarterly returns.  But even the industry, for the most part, agrees that hydrogen fuel cell powered vehicles are the most likely end-game. The trouble is that with incremental adoption of fuel cells (by squeezing them into a car designed for a petrol engine and trying to persuade them to behave like one, which they do not do very well) a commercially viable vehicle won't be available for 10 years or more.  Yet we intend to show that where there's a will there's a way, and we could have hydrogen fuel cell powered cars on the road at a sensible price within just three or four years - or less if we acknowledged the urgency and adopted a wartime mindset.  Indeed, if we accept that change is necessary, why prolong the agony?

Our aim is to start changing the nature of the conversations in policy making circles when we unveil our working demonstrator later this month.