A new land speed record was set today in Utah by British driver Andy Green, driving a specially designed JCB Hydromax car, which reached 406.320 miles per hour.
The milestone was set in the bright yellow tubular vehilce, powered by two hydrogen internal combustion engines, which Green calls the “fuel of the future” at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.
He easily beat the previous class record for a hydrogen engine, which had stood at 185 mph.
The driver is a former Royal Air Force fighter pilot who is the only person to have broken the sound barrier on land, which he did when setting the overall land speed record, reaching 763 mph in a car powered by twin jet engines in 1997.
UK company JCB, founded in 1945, is best known for its heavy machinery and is one of the world’s largest privately owned manufacturers of construction and agricultural equipment — but it has also been quietly making a major bet on hydrogen power.
Lord Anthony Bamford — who chairs the company his father, Joseph Cyril Bamford, founded — has invested more than $132 million over the last five years into developing hydrogen combustion engines, a cleaner alternative to diesel engines which emit harmless water instead of carbon dioxide, the bi-product of burning regular fuel.
While another kind of hydrogen power, hydrogen fuel cells, has been used for some automobiles in recent years, JCB researchers found the technology too complex, too costly and not robust enough to work in its heavy equipment. Therefore the company concentrated on a modified internal-combustion engine that can be more easily integrated into future equipment.
While Bamford, who is spending the week in Utah, is excited about the speed test, he is far more focused on what the technology can do beyond the salt flats, he told The Post.
“Anything can be a hydrogen engine,” Bamford, 80, explained to me.
The company is poised to immediately deploy the technology with its ultimate goal to put hydrogen engines into a large portion of its fleet.
“Making engines is something we are used to,” Bamford said. The company produces roughly 400 engines a day and over one million are currently in operation around the world.
In the years since this project started, JCB has quickly moved from prototypes in December 2020 to having fully approved working hydrogen combustion engines in equipment.
It is a playbook JCB has used before.
In 2006, the company publicized its diesel engines with the Dieselmax speed test, a streamliner vehicle driven by Green which became the world’s fastest diesel-powered vehicle at 350 mph, a record which still stands.
“It’s part of a history of a company doing this,” Bamford said. “We have done it before.”
The goal, he added, is to show how “what you’d think are mundane products are actually on the cutting edge.”
The hydrogen push also comes as JCB expands its footprint in the United States. The company is building a new one-million-square-foot factory in San Antonio, Texas, at a cost of $500 million.
The plant, originally planned at 500,000 square feet, was doubled in size after the 2025 tariffs on imports were announced, as JCB decided to invest in manufacturing more of its equipment for American customers on US soil. The facility is projected to employ about 1,500 people.
The expansion in Texas and the hydrogen program are part of the same longer-term bet: building more “Made in America” machines while preparing the next generation of engines that will power them.
If anyone can do it, Bamford argues it is JCB.
“We sell 140,000 machines around the world a year, and virtually all have been powered by diesel,” he said. “And now they will be hydrogen engines.”