BAC Mono – hydrogen fuel cell future – why this British sports car maker isn’t going electric.
In the road-going world, there isn’t a more focused driver’s car than the BAC Mono. It looks like a single-seat racing car wearing lights and number plates and drives like one too, holding many production car lap records.
Since its launch a decade ago, just shy of 150 Monos have been shipped to more than 40 countries and it has been carefully, methodically evolved. Today’s Mono R is even more aerodynamic, more powerful and lighter than the original.
It’s a pure driver’s car with minimal frills – ‘a car designed to go from A to A’. So what kind of Mono does BAC plan to build for the upcoming ban on the sale of new petrol- and diesel-engined cars, from 2030 in the UK and recently confirmed in the EU from 2035?
Caterham and Morgan are looking at making battery electric vehicle (BEV) sports cars while Ariel is on the verge of launching its ‘Hipercar’, a BEV supercar (see issues 297, 299 and 298 respectively). BAC has a different plan.
BAC – Briggs Automotive Company – was created by Neill and Ian Briggs (pictured right and left respectively). The brothers had established a design and engineering consultancy, working for premium brands including Porsche and Mercedes, before creating and launching the Mono.
Ian Briggs, who is responsible for design, said:
The Mono was never designed to be transport, it’s not missing a seat.
Yet despite the single-minded focus of the Mono, their approach to its development over the last decade and the innovations they have pursued to save weight have applications in vehicles generally.
When the original 280bhp 2.3-litre in-line four was replaced in 2015 by a 2.5-litre with 305bhp, it brought with it a drive-by-wire throttle that allowed the introduction of a number of electronic aids that its wealthy customers had come to expect, such as launch control, scalable traction control and an electronic handbrake.
Simultaneously, BAC began to introduce some of the lightweighting they had been working on, offering a carbon-ceramic brake package and ‘carbon-hybrid’ wheels.
These hybrid wheels save a massive 2kg per corner, but rather than being made wholly out of carbon, it’s only used for the rim. “The most important place to save weight is the rim. That’s the furthest from the centre,” says Ian.
“The centre piece we can change every year if we want. It’s a CNC machined part. We can change the material, we can do all kinds of innovation there. The point of the niche vehicle sector is we are incubators and accelerators for new technology because we’re small, we’re agile, we can make quick decisions, we can react quickly, we can fail quickly, but more often than not succeed.”
Lightweighting benefits all types of vehicle.
Neill Briggs, said:
With regards to electric vehicles, anything that can be done to save weight has an automatic correlation to the range extension, and obviously range is one of the fundamental issues these days.
So we started to look at other new technology coming through and in 2013/14 we started investigating graphene.’
This extraordinary material, isolated and investigated at Manchester University, of which Neill is an alumnus, has many remarkable properties. When used in carbonfibre panels, it adds strength for very little weight.
BAC’s graphene project, partly funded through APC (Advanced Propulsion Centre) and the Niche Vehicle Network, resulted in lighter carbonfibre panels on the Mono R, launched in 2019. Another property of graphene is that it conducts electricity, which offers more opportunities. “Not only can you make panels structurally the same but lighter,” says Ian, “you can also pass electricity through it, so you can start thinking about deleting the wiring loom”
Another material they’re developing and proving is niobium, which is a bit like graphene for metal. “Niobium was discovered in the early 18th century and is mined predominantly in Brazil by a company called CBMM,” says Ian.
“When it’s added into the high-strength steel alloy mix in very, very small amounts it enhances the structural properties, doubling yield and tensile strengths. For a Mono chassis with the same structural performance it’s 18 per cent lighter. In terms of its usage and licensing we can talk quite freely to other manufacturers about how we’ve created lightweight and safer structures.”
Regarding the power source of a Mono built for the upcoming regulations in the UK and EU, a battery electric Mono using current technology was a non-starter. “It would weigh 50 per cent more and the joy of a track-focused supercar is its agility and responsiveness through corners,” says Ian. The closest thing to an electric Mono wasn’t encouraging, he adds.
“State of the art is a Formula E racer. It’s 900kg, it will just about do a 30-minute race, it costs a million euros and at Goodwood it was three or four seconds slower than our car up the hill. So we’re gonna go slower for half an hour. It just wasn’t a product we could sell.
The appeal of the hydrogen fuel cell powertrain to BAC is obvious then, but it’s great for packaging as well as weight. All the components of the fuel cell drivetrain can be incorporated into the Mono’s design, meaning that the hard-won refinements and improvements in engineering and aerodynamics can be carried over.
In the e‑Mono concept, the small battery pack goes behind and beneath the single driver’s seat and is a structural component, the fuel cell is mounted above it and its compressor is located inside what is the air intake pod of the ICE version. The battery delivers the equivalent of 264bhp, the fuel cell 107bhp, for a total of 371bhp.
“You’ve got this constant energy that’s coming from the fuel cell and then you’ve got this additional energy from the battery as and when you need it,’ says Neill. ‘You size your energy sources according to your usage.” A truck or a ship would have a large battery to provide the push to get their mass moving, for example.
“So where we are at is we’ve got an application of that equation that works perfectly for a high-performance car. The battery we’re investigating is the same as in Formula 1 – high density, high deploy, high regen – and the size of a couple of computers.”
A fuel cell car produces only water as a by-product and can refuel much faster than a BEV can recharge – it’s like filling up with petrol or diesel – and there aren’t the same issues of maintenance of performance on a track because the battery always works in its optimum range.
A key objective set by BAC was that the e‑Mono should match or better the Silverstone lap time of the Mono R. From the outset, BAC designed the Mono in the computer and now uses a ‘digital twin’ to gauge the effect of any changes.
“Obviously, it’s only as good as the quality of the data that goes in”, says Neill, but for the last two or three years they have been uploading all the data from real world testing and also have measured data on their actual tyres from Pirelli.
“We’re within a couple of per cent now, which is very, very good,” says Ian. “We can change parameters such as horsepower, torque, grip, damper rates and gearing.”
READ the latest news shaping the hydrogen market at Hydrogen Central
BAC’s hydrogen fuel-cell future – why this British sports car maker isn’t going electric, December 3, 2022
