Up to £56m of private and public funding has been made available to major low carbon transport projects backed by the likes of Ford, Jaguar Land Rover and Nissan, as well as several mid-sized companies.

The Technology Strategy Board (TSB) said today that 17 research, development and validation projects would benefit from the £27m it had invested in conjunction with the Office for Low Emission Vehicles, alongside a further £29m of private sector backing.

The projects include plans from Wrightbus to develop a production-ready hybrid bus incorporating a flywheel to store energy, which is expected to cut fuel emissions 15 per cent, and proposals from Jaguar Land Rover to produce light-weight low energy materials.

Meanwhile, Ashwoods Automotive and its partners have secured funding to help create a single, standardised product incorporating a motor, controller and gearbox, and cooling and connectors, that can be dropped into electric and hybrid cars.

The TSB said it is aiming to help reduce supply chain costs for the automotive industry and accelerate the adoption of new technologies under the auspices of the public-private Low Carbon Vehicles Innovation Platform (LCVIP).

Transport Minister Norman Baker said: “Accelerating the commercialisation of low carbon vehicle technologies will help to achieve our challenging climate change targets as well as creating new jobs, and increasing opportunities for UK businesses on the world stage.”

In related news, the government and industry-backed Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) has today launched a £2.5m project to improve the efficiency of heavy duty vehicles (HDVs).

It has targeted halving the so-called parasitic losses, caused by the churning of lubricant oil and component friction in the lower drivetrain system, which can account for more than 10 per cent of the energy lost by HDVs.

The project, led by Nottingham-based Romax Technology, along with Castrol Ltd and ANSYS Inc, will look to improve the overall system design of HDVs by addressing the way gears, bearings, surface treatments, lubricant flow and lubricant composition work together.

It forms part of a £40m ETI programme designed to increase HDV efficiency in land and marine vehicles by up to 30 per cent and cut emissions by up to a third.

Chris Thorne, programme manager HDVs at the ETI, said the project would bring these goals within reach.

“It is critical that we develop technology solutions that are affordable for the industry and meet the needs of the customers,” he said. “Vehicle fuel efficiency could be increased by two to five per cent if lower drivetrain losses could be effectively halved, which means this project has the potential to make a beneficial step-change to the HDV industry.”