“You have to change everything so that nothing changes!”
Crazy about cars--a “sweet euphemism”--Faouzi Annajah didn’t want to lose the pleasure of driving and felt constrained by the limits of reserves when driving an electric car. Just before the Vivatech technology show, the entrepreneur had his V8 hydrogen combustion engine--developed and manufactured by Solution F--validated. “This is an important step for us,” explains Annajah, a former Volkswagen employee. “We’ve been in a 20-month marathon since the spring. We needed to raise €25m so that, with our partners, we can show a prototype on the road in the first quarter of 2025.”
Four hundred customers have already pre-ordered the car (designed by Pininfarina), and 4,000 are on the waiting list. “We have a strong community around us of people who love the car and want it to have no negative impact on the environment,” says Annajah. The distinctive feature of the 300bhp and 550bhp SUV, which reaches 100km/h in 6.5 and 4.5 seconds respectively, is also its dual tank technology: a conventional fuel tank that is filled and six cartridges placed in a cover at the rear of the vehicle, almost level with the bumper. “We have a patent for this technology, which answers the question we are most often asked: what happens in the event of a rear-end crash? A system protects the cartridges by tilting them to avoid compression,” he explains.
The six cartridges at the rear of the car. Photo: NamX
The delay caused by the about-face of a Middle Eastern fund that absolutely wanted a version with an electric battery is not necessarily a problem: apart from the fact that the recharging network will take longer to build-- even a car with 800km of range needs to be recharged--contacts with investors are intensifying, between VCs who want to enter series A or B funding rounds, and Americans who are becoming insistent. One American state seems to have convinced Annajah to move the project to the United States.
This article was written for the of Paperjam magazine, published on 9 July. The content of the magazine is produced exclusively for the magazine. It is published on the website as a contribution to the complete Paperjam archive.
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