Apricale hypercar features hydrogen powertrain technology from Viritech

The cleantech’s engineers have presented the new tech in the first zero-emission hypercar in the world.

Viritech, a cleantech company, has announced that its Apricale will be the first vehicle in the world to receive a hydrogen powertrain and become a zero-emission hypercar.

The weight of the H2 car is only 1,000 kg and is expected to achieve hypercar performance.

The idea is to change the Apricale’s driving experience by bringing together the agility associated with some of the best hypercars powered by fossil fuel with an electric motor’s instant response. According to Viritech, the electric drivetrain makes it possible for the Apercale to become more responsive than conventional petroleum product-powered hypercars.

Many vehicles don’t have the capacity to function with a powertrain heavier than that of a conventional internal combustion engine. These categories of vehicle have been held out of zero-emission powertrain transitions, since batteries are always heavier than internal combustion engines. Moreover, the greater the vehicle’s power requirements, the greater the impact will be on weight.

The Apricale’s hydrogen powertrain shows that zero-emission can provide the same level of power.

Moreover, it is also showing that H2 can perform with the same weight and range of an internal combustion engine. The strategy to move beyond all the zero-emission vehicle compromises pushed the engineers at Viritech to look at the way fuel cells and batteries work together in an entirely new way.

“Hydrogen fuel cells have, until now, been used as range extenders for powertrains with batteries at their heart,” said Viritech CTO Matt Faulks. “We’ve essentially turned that approach on its head, developing a powertrain around multi-hundred kW fuel cell system supported by a lightweight but highly efficient battery. This delivers hypercar performance for Apricale, but at less than half the weight of typical BEV hypercars. Not only does this reduction in weight transform Apricale’s driving dynamics, but our reduced reliance on batteries means less demand on rare earth minerals.”

The Apercale and its hydrogen powertrain tech weighs about 1,000 kilograms. As such, it will be able to move beyond the constraints associated with a battery electric vehicle technology using hypercar.