While some automakers are holding out hope that hydrogen vehicles could be a viable option in the future, Jaguar is fiercely opposed to them.
According to Jaguar Land Rover’s technical design director Wolfgang Ziebart, fuel cell vehicles are “complete nonsense”, echoing similar sentiments held by Elon Musk.
Speaking with Autocar, Ziebart said that the energy used to produce, compress, cool and store hydrogen for a fuel cell vehicle is simply inefficient.
“You end up with a well to wheel efficiency of roughly 30% for hydrogen, as opposed to more or less well to wheel 70% efficiency for a battery electric vehicle. So the efficiency of putting the electric energy directly into a battery is about twice as high as the efficiency of producing and using hydrogen. If there was a strong reason to have a hydrogen infrastructure, then I think it would be set up, but with this disastrous well-to-wheel relationship, it doesn’t just make sense,” Ziebart said.
The exec’s comments come on the back of the British brand launching the all-electric I-Pace Concept at the Los Angeles Auto Show, a model it hopes to bring to the market in 2018. In the lead-up to its arrival, a number of different Jaguar Land Rover products will receive varying forms of electrification.
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