fcev

Daimler, Ford and Nissan have signed a three-way agreement to collaboratively develop fuel cell electric vehicles to accelerate getting the technology onto the road. The deal will see each company developing its own vehicle but with a common fuel cell system, sharing development and investment costs.

The companies hope to have affordable fuel cell EVs ready by 2017 with common components to standardise and define global specifications for the technology and encourage faster commercialisation.

(L - R: Raj Nair of Ford, Thomas Weber of Daimler and Mitsuhiko Yamashita of Nissan)

“Working together will significantly help speed this technology to market at a more affordable cost to our customers,” said Raj Nair, group Vice President, Global Product Development, Ford Motor Company. “We will all benefit from this relationship as the resulting solution will be better than any one company working alone.”

Each company will invest equally to develop a common fuel cell stack and fuel cell system that each company can use in their individual FCEVs. This work will be done at several sites around the world to speed up engineering development.

A similar agreement was made by Toyota and BMW in June 2012, and extended in January 2013, to develop a fuel cell system for a lightweight sports vehicle.