Video | JCB’s Hydromax car and how it could shape hydrogen engines for construction

The car’s development comes two decades on from JCB breaking the land speed record at Bonneville with Dieselmax, powered by two race-adapted diesel engines.

JCB has spent £100 million on developing the hydrogen-powered internal combustion engine, and the Hydromax record bid, conceived just a year ago, aims to prove the robustness of the technology by setting a new speed record for a zero emissions vehicle.

JCB is also hopeful that Hydromax, which will produce a combined 1,600hp from two engines, will surpass the 350mph (563kph) set by Dieselmax.

Assisted by Prodrive, Ricardo, and Xtrac, JCB started building the car just six weeks ago and is currently undertaking a series of test runs on a runway at RAF Wittering in England.

That is prior to the 32-feet-long (9.8m) car being shipped out to the US on a specially chartered Antonov plane on 2 July in time to have it ready to participate in Bonneville Speed Week (1-7 August) and then the FIA record attempt later in the month.

The car is being piloted by Wing Commander Andy Green, who also drove Dieselmax when it broke its record. He has also been the overall world land speed record holder since 1997, when he broke the sound barrier in ThrustSSC.

Despite the strong motorsport theme attached to the Hydromax project, however, JCB’s advanced projects deployment manager Tom Beamish, said that the company expected the project to enhance development of its hydrogen-powered construction equipment.

JCB has already made a 3CX backhoe loader powered by a 55kW hydrogen combustion engine commercially available, as well as the G60RS H hydrogen-powered generator that works in tandem with JCB’s 3-phase powerpack battery.

The engine that sits in the hydrogen-powered 3CX has served as the base for Hydromax, although it has undergone significant modifications to produce ten times the power (around 800hp).

Beamish told Construction Briefing, “We’re always learning whenever we do something like this. Take for instance when we did the world’s fastest tractor, we developed really sophisticated turbo charging systems with that. Those same turbo charging systems were then used as learning to then develop the hydrogen engines for production.

“So what we expect is that actually out of this engineering endeavour that we are doing now, we are going to be able to take so many learning points to then be able to provide into our next generation of hydrogen equipment.”

He added that the company is also working with partners to ensure that enough hydrogen, which is still only produced at small scale in the UK at the moment, is supplied to customers’ machines.

JCB chairman Lord Bamford has separately called on governments around the world that are serious about decarbonising construction to invest in hydrogen production and specifically to incentivise in electrolyser facilities capable of producing hydrogen.