Hyundai enlists London College of Fashion to raise awareness of Hydrogen Fuel Cell cars

With the Hyundai iX35 FCEV (Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle) becoming a reality, Hyundai are turning to the London College of Fashion to help raise awareness of FCEVs.

The Hyundai ix35 FCEV (pictured) will get graphics from the LCF to promote FCEVs

Even though car makers have been playing with the possibility of cars powered by hydrogen for years, it’s only now that an real-world FCEVs are starting to hit the road.

Car makers certainly seemed to have made the hydrogen fuel cell a practical proposition for powering cars (although cost is still an obstacle), but that’s just the start of making FCEVs a viable option.

Huge amounts of work need to be done to create a hydrogen refuelling network but, perhaps more importantly, car buyers need to understand that FCEVs are viable and that they exist at all.

With the Hyundai ix35 FCEV in the vanguard of the (probable) hydrogen fuel cell revolution, Hyundai has turned to the London College of Fashion (we’re back to Hyundai UK’s female-centric PR again!) to help them raise awareness of hydrogen cars.

The new partnership between Hyundai and the LCF is called ‘Fashion Fuel Cell’ and is commissioning 159 students to design a visual campaign to get the message across. The brief is:

Using fashion as a discipline to drive brand awareness and change, build a sustainable future and improve the way we live our lives.

Hopefully the end result is a bit less dry than the brief, which we’ll discover when the winning entries are turned in to vinyl and applied to the ten ix35 FCEVs that will be used to ferry VIPs around during the LCF undergraduate show in June.

Tony Whitehorn, Hyundai UK’s boss, said:

We are delighted to be collaborating with London College of Fashion. This project will allow students to not only showcase their work around London, but also help raise awareness and educate people about technology that has the potential to genuinely change the world in which we live.
The time is now right for hydrogen-powered vehicles and we welcome the announcement from the UK Government, through the Office for Low Emission Vehicles, that it wishes to position the UK as a lead market for the introduction of hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles.

We might make light of Hyundai’s use of the LCF to promote hydrogen power, but it’s actually a sensible – and cost-effective – route to pursue, and anything that can help make FCEVs a reality, however small, is good news.