Lord Bamford talks hydrogen; says politicians have been ‘mesmerised by Musk’
JCB Chairman Lord Bamford has urged the ‘powers that be’ to introduce the infrastructure so that hydrogen can be more easily accessible for heavy duty machines.
Lord Bamford is personally leading JCB’s hydrogen initiatives and his company has developed an internal combustion engine that is powered by hydrogen.
He believes politicians around the globe have been ‘mesmerised’ by Tesla CEO Elon Musk – and feels the major advantage hydrogen engines have over electric solutions is the fact they ‘are not inflationary’.
Lord Bamford spoke to Harry Metcalfe on a Harry’s Garage YouTube episode called “Is hydrogen, rather than electric, the future for big-engined machinery?”.
Lord Bamford said: “There’s still a great future for an internal combustion engine – they are highly reliable and they are not inflationary.
“A family saloon, like a Vauxhall Astra, costs £14k, whereas a Vauxhall Astra Electric is £29k – this is highly inflationary.
“We have 7,500 people who come to work at JCB – and the majority of them come in their car.
“So if it’s going to double to buy a family car – not only are they having a problem buying a house at the moment, it’s also hard buying a car – these elements are not thought of by politicians.
“We buy batteries from five different sources – and if you ask them what the price is going to be a year out, or two years out, they are going to be more.
“The main reason is that the rare earth materials in them, particularly lithium, cobalt, copper – copper has doubled in a year. Is it going to come down again, just because the volume goes up?
“There’s no labour in building batteries – or very little – so you are really building a thing with lots of these elements in – and the cost is not going to come down.”
READ MORE: Hydrogen vs. Electric Cars: Will hydrogen win the battle for the future of fuel?
Workload an issue for electric machines
JCB have made a range of electric machines but have found they cannot meet the needs of their clients’ workload as they need to be recharged after around five hours.
He explained: “A passenger car does about 300 hours a year, something like that on average.
“It’s very much a case of it is just going from home to work and back again and and a bit further but not a lot further.
“Construction machinery is there to do a job – somebody earns money owning that machine so they want it working for a full day’s shift.
“A full day shift on, say, a mini excavator may be four or five hours – but on a backhoe, it could be an eight-hour shift – it could be double shifted and be 16 hours.
“It’s the same with trucks, particularly heavy-duty trucks. In America, they are doing thousands of miles in a day, double shifting.
“Our electric range of machines will run for what we call a full day shift for them, which is probably about five hours – and then they need to be recharged.”
Influence on hydrogen infrastructure
Lord Bamford expressed his enthusiasm for the progress made by JCB’s engineers, stating: “[We’re] developing zero-carbon solutions for future machinery.
“Our hydrogen engines are a super-efficient, affordable answer to the need for fossil fuel alternatives in construction and agriculture, and they can be rapidly brought to market using our existing supply base.”
He added: “This is a very good solution – we now need the infrastructure to provide the hydrogen – you can’t influence that bit, but we’d like to influence it.
“More than anything I want to influence the powers that be that an internal combustion engine’s days are not over.
“There is still a great future for internal combustion engines for all sorts of reasons – one of them is that people know how to work on them.
“We’ve got 770 dealers worldwide and I don’t know how many mechanics and engineers that can work on them.”
‘Mesmerised by Elon Musk’
Regarding the ‘rush to electric’ as the solution to moving away from fossil fuels, Lord Bamford said: “I do believe that politicians worldwide, particularly in America, and Britain and probably in Europe, are mesmerised by [Elon] Musk.
“I think Musk was around at a time when Volkswagen was cheating – and it’s a combination of him with a fresh new way of doing things, and the Germans caught cheating.
“I think it has given such a bad name to the combustion engine – it’s not the combustion engine that’s a problem, it’s the fossil fuels.
“We’re showing that it’s possible to have an internal combustion engine without having dirty fuel.”
When asked if hydrogen plays a part in passenger cars and sports cars, he said: “Looking ahead, I think it should be actively considered by the powers that be.
“I don’t think the car manufacturers should be intimidated by Musk.
“I think the engines that they make are so inexpensive, so they are not inflationary. My humble view is that they should make them work with hydrogen – it’s possible to do it.”