17 E-Mobility Engineering | July/August 2026 Jim Edwards | In conversation sees plenty of potential for hydrogen to fit in within the automotive energy mix. “Currently, there’s not so much spare fuel about to make it really cheap, and the fuel cell stacks require precious metals, so they tend to be expensive. But in places where you’ve got a lot of renewable generation, which has to be stored somehow, hydrogen is a very good way of doing it,” he says. “So, I think it will get into niches where it works well – captive fleets, articulated lorries, trains; any place where you have a defined drive cycle and can put the infrastructure in to suit it. For those cases, it’s a very good zero carbon answer.” Onto electric Edwards’ career journey moved to the battery electric space next, when he joined current employer Helix in 2015. He took on the wide-reaching role of lead engineer, spanning many functions including interfacing with the customer, carrying out technical liaison, analysing drive cycles and managing a crossfunctional team of electronics, electrical and mechanical designers, scientists and workshop technicians. “It was a role that suited generalists,” he says, explaining how he stepped in at such a level despite minimal experience in battery electric technologies. His first management role involved the development of a small e-booster – an electric supercharger. “These traditionally involve an electric motor attached to a turbocharger compressor, geared to around 100,000 rpm,” he explains. “The difficulty is that in a passenger car, you need up to 10 kW to drive it and that causes two problems – the motor overheats as it’s hard to get the losses out of it, and if it doesn’t overheat, the battery discharges because it doesn’t have the capacity for more than 5 or 10 minutes of that demand. “To overcome that, we did a very smart thing. We designed a starter generator, so you could crank and generate electricity on the front-end accessory drive. Then, we designed the motor that drove the compressor wheel, built an epicyclic gear into it and connected the other element through to the pulley wheel on the front-end accessory drive, which meant that the motor only had to do part of the job because the other power was being provided straight from the frontend accessory drive. As a result, the motor is doing less work. “The other thing was that because you’ve got the generator there as well, you can produce the electricity locally and drive it straight over to the wheel at the other side, so you don’t need to take it to a battery pack. You can generate it in real-time, and you can switch off the compressor by changing the speed because it’s part of an epicyclic gearbox. It was a beautiful solution and we were working with Magna Power to bring it to high volume – but it just came to fruition as the automotive industry decided it didn’t want internal combustion engines!” into scooters with Suzuki to producing a tiny 5 W hydrogen-powered mobile phone charger. “That charger was a nice piece of kit,” recalls Edwards. “But unfortunately, it didn’t take off.” Given his automotive background, Edwards’ focus was placed on the development of fuel cell systems for passenger cars. “We had 100 kW, two fuel cell stacks, which were evaporatively cooled using a proprietary technology,” he explains. “The system introduced liquid water as a fine mist, which would evaporate and absorb the heat and pass out the exhaust as a gas. It had a significant power density benefit and we put that system into a vehicle from a premium European automotive manufacturer. Around the same time, we also ran a fleet of five hydrogen taxis for the London Olympics in 2012, taking VIPs into the Olympic village.” The business has since gone on to be successful in air-cooled systems for drones, however, and Edwards still Helix offers a family of electric motors to suit a range of applications Automotive was a focus sector in the early days of Edwards’ time with Helix
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