Viritech Apricale, one of the world’s first hydrogen hypercar

Viritech announces its move to its new engineering facility at Horiba-MIRA in Nuneaton. Following development and testing at the base at MIRA, the Viritech Apricale will go into limited production at the beginning of 2023, with just 25-cars produced.  The Apricale hypercar is Viritech’s start point for a cleantech revolution based on zero emissions hydrogen powertrain development that will extend into HGV solutions and onward to marine, aerospace and power generation.

Hydrogen fuel tanks have been incorporated into hydrogen vehicles as an appendage – i.e. they have been attached to the vehicle chassis, rather then incorporated as an integral component – and due to the extremely high pressures at which hydrogen is stored in gas form (up to 700 bar), even when constructed with carbon fibre, they have a highly unattractive weight efficiency of around 5% – i.e. to store 5 Kgs of hydrogen (sufficient to cover around 300 miles in a family car) results in a total weight for the tank and hydrogen of c.100 Kgs.

The Apricale hypercar is the starting point for Viritech’s development program, from which a family of powertrain solutions and other proprietary technologies will flow, including vehicle control systems and structural pressure vessels.

Today’s announcement is the latest in a number of new agreements being finalized with other next-gen mobility businesses who are set to benefit from the support that MIRA Technology Park is able to offer companies as they scale.

The provision of comprehensive engineering consultancy services across the entire V-cycle and the most extensive automotive test and proving infrastructure in Europe means that scaling businesses can focus on their differentiating IP and hand over other non-core engineering requirements to HORIBA MIRA’s experts.

The company said its Vehicle Control System technology sits at the heart of our hydrogen powertrain solutions, providing for the first time a family of control systems to enable the integration of modern, hydrogen powertrain solutions in vehicles, machinery, aircraft, boats/ships and off-grid energy storage and electricity generation plants.