Charles Morgan is shouting into his mobile, trying to make himself heard above the roar of the racetrack at Goodwood in Chichester.
As the man behind Morgan sports cars, he seems an unlikely advocate for environmentally-friendly cars but he is loudly extolling the virtues of hydrogen-powered cars and the novelty of silent driving.
"What's really exciting about driving? Perhaps the noise has nothing to do with it," he shouts. "Perhaps it's possible to make a car that's completely quiet, that drives like a sports car - makes you feel every bit of the road - but all you hear is a whoosh."
Morgan plans to build a hydrogen-powered sports car with the research firm Qinetiq and a smattering of university groups. If all goes to plan, the team will deliver the LIFEcar in three years.
No one at Morgan or Qinetiq pretends that LIFEcar will save the planet, but if the project proves that environmentally friendly cars needn't lack looks or performance, it might just encourage others to look more seriously at making them.
Projects such as LIFEcar encourage development of fuel cells and electric motors to power them. In the latest issue of Science, Mark Jacobson and colleagues at Stanford University calculated that if all the vehicles in the US were powered by hydrogen, the resulting drop in pollution - in the form of carbon monoxide, ozone and nitrogen oxides - would prevent between 3,000 and 6,000 deaths a year.
One problem facing a hydrogen economy is creating an efficient infrastructure. In a paper soon to be published in the journal Energy, a team led by Zhijia Huang at China's Anhui University assessed various means of generating hydrogen and making it available to drivers needing to fill up around Shanghai.
The researchers found that while eight out of 10 pathways led to cuts in urban pollution emissions, six of the 10 methods consumed more energy and generated more greenhouse gases than the existing petrol-based infrastructure. The best way to generate hydrogen, they concluded, was to use natural gas; the worst was electrolysis to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Picking the most efficient way to make and distribute hydrogen isn't the only issue for hydrogen cars. According to a study carried out at the California Institute of Technology and Nasa's jet propulsion laboratory, leaks could have a damaging effect on the atmosphere.
The study, reported in Science, says inevitable gas leaks from hydrogen production facilities, transporting the fuel and the cars themselves, would lead to a four- to eight-fold rise in the amount of the gas being pumped into the atmosphere. If the hydrogen accumulated in the stratosphere, as the team believe it would, the likely effect would be a 10 per cent drop in ozone levels.
... - Guardian News Service