Who is H2X?
AUSSIE VEHICLE START-UP BETS HOUSE ON HYDROGEN
H2X AUSTRALIA is a small tech start-up currently employing 70 staff and based in Port Kembla, NSW. The company’s aim is to bring the vehicle you see here, the Snowy SUV, to market in 2022. That’s right, an Aussie-designed vehicle within a couple of years, assembled locally from an imported chassis.
There are some significant hurdles to overcome, not least of which is that the Snowy utilises a hydrogen fuel cell. While that’s H2X’s core piece of intellectual property, it also relies on a fuelling network that currently consists of one station in Canberra. CEO Brendan Norman, who has held executive positions with VW and Audi and has worked on hydrogen start-ups Grove and Riverside in the last decade, is aware of this chickenand-egg scenario. “We’re already discussing how we lay that out, but we need vehicles to be there to be able to use the hydrogen,” Norman said. He envisages a rollout of five to 15 stations by 2021 to cater for commercial customers first with a subsequent expansion into cities for private vehicle usage.
Also on staff is former head of design at Fiat and Nissan Europe, Chris Reitz, and Alan Marder, a former tech solutions director at Toyota.
Indeed, H2X is looking at a range of hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV) applications including people movers, tractors and trains. It’s long been believed that hydrogen is better suited to these heavyweights, with battery-driven vehicles targeting private users. H2X claims that funding is already in place to expand the company and build the Snowy and another vehicle, equipped with a 300550kW output from its ElringKlinger fuel cell and ultra-capacitor platform resulting in a claimed range in the region of 650km. It also features a regenerative suspension that converts chassis kinetics into electrical energy.
In developing a nascent hydrogen infrastructure for commercial vehicles first – much like the rollout of LPG in
Australia – H2X can then piggyback consumer technology off the back of it. It’s unclear if the tech can ever be made cost-effective, but H2X has an imported prototype that it is now localising, whereupon it will be showcased as a proof of concept.
H2X claims to already have “tens of millions” of dollars of investment