Featured

What is the most confusing car brand of all time? It’s an intriguing question – and we reckon the answer might well be Talbot.

The story started all the way back in 1888, when Charles Chetwynd-Talbot, the 20th Earl of Shrewsbury, founded a London taxi firm with the competitive advantage of using newfangled pneumatic tyres.

Eight years later, the Earl entered business with one Adolphe Clément, who had made a fortune from said invention, to sell the Frenchman’s tyres, bicycles and cars in London.

In 1902, the pair strengthened their partnership, rebranding the cars Clément-Talbot. But after just a year they bisected their business: the Earl would sell cars badged Talbot in Britain, his partner cars badged Clément-Bayard in France.

Amusingly in hindsight, adverts in Autocar stated that this change was being made “in order to prevent confusion in the mind of the public”. In 1906, the Earl’s London factory began making cars of its own design, separating the two firms yet further.

Talbot soon started succeeding in races and reliability trials, earning it the nickname ‘Invincible Talbot’. Its biggest coup came in 1913, when Percy Lambert became the first person to do 100 miles in an hour, lapping Brooklands in a 25hp special – even though “he could hardly see for several laps” due to thick fog.

Enjoy full access to the complete Autocar archive at the magazineshop.com

The Great War badly disrupted the London firm and literally gutted the Paris firm, and both struggled to recover afterwards.

So in late 1919 the Earl sold up to Darracq, a British-owned French car maker; and in 1921 Clément sold his factory to local upstart André Citroën.

The new owners of the Earl’s old firm kept the Talbot brand for London-made cars and started using Talbot-Darracq for Paris-made cars. In short order, they bought Wolverhampton’s Sunbeam and put the lot under the unfortunately named umbrella of STD Motors.

Real excitement came in 1930 as Talbot ventured to Le Mans for the famous 24-hour race and upset the big players.

Bentley scored a one-two with its 6.6-litre monsters, but Bugatti, Alfa Romeo, Mercedes and MG were all outclassed by Talbot’s 2.3-litre 90s – “really remarkable”, said Autocar. It then twice repeated this impressive feat in the following years with its enhanced 105s.

However, all was not well, as the Western world had plunged into a terrible economic depression and Sunbeam had long been unable to replicate Talbot’s prosperity, eventually dragging STD under.

Rootes, owner of Britain’s Hillman and Humber car brands, came to the rescue of Sunbeam and Talbot, leading Autocar to proclaim: “Under this energetic new management, there is no doubt that the Talbot name will continue to rank high in automobile circles.”

It looked as though the Talbot-Darracq business would vanish – until an unexpected buyout by its managing director, the “large and determined” Italian Antonio Lago.

Henceforth two separate firms would use the Talbot brand, but to avoid confusion Lago’s cars were usually referred to in Britain as Darracqs or Talbot-Lagos.

The two firms trod diverging paths: Talbot built restyled humble Hillmans while Talbot-Lago went upmarket with its cars, provided chassis for coachbuilt stunners and competed in grands prix.

In 1938, Rootes decided to merge Talbot and Sunbeam, introducing yet another hyphenated name to this already muddled lineage.

Both Talbots enjoyed the 1950s: Talbot-Lago won grands prix and Le Mans with its T26 and crafted some beautiful luxury and sporting cars for the road, while Sunbeam-Talbot attracted envy for its saloons and convertibles – one of which also won the Coupes des Alpes in the hands of Stirling Moss.

However, confusion persisted, leading Rootes to shorten Sunbeam-Talbot to just Sunbeam in 1954 – “a short life but a merry one”, we said. And five years later, Talbot-Lago’s prolonged suffocation by postwar austerity and heavy taxation on luxury cars finally killed it, its assets being bought by Simca.

But that was not the end of the story. Simca and Rootes both later became part of Chrysler Europe, and when that rotten business was dumped at PSA’s door in 1979, guess which of its defunct brands – Alvis, Bugatti, Delage, Delahaye, Panhard, Simca, Sunbeam and Talbot – was deemed ripest for revival?

“It has the best image of strength with the European public,” president François Perrin-Pelletier explained to Autocar. “Most of all, however, it is perceived by 80% of the British public as an English make and 80% of the French as a French make.”

It didn’t last long. Talbots either overlapped with other PSA models or were duds, so the next-generation models were redirected to Peugeot and the brand was consigned to die again with the Express van in 1994.

Honestly, what a mess.

The lack of a hydrogen fuelling infrastructure in the UK remains a big stumbling block for the roll-out of hydrogen cars and could lead BMW not to offer its new FCEV here.

Right now the UK has just three hydrogen filling stations for cars and only three more in the pipeline, according to data from UK H2 Mobility. 

“We sincerely hope that the infrastructure will develop further, because right now the UK is not in a condition where [launching] would make sense,” Jürgen Guldner, head of BMW’s hydrogen vehicle project, told a panel of experts at an event in London on 5 June.

BMW plans to sell its first FCEV in 2028 but hasn’t revealed which vehicle will receive the powertrain or where it will be sold. 

It will use Toyota’s fuel-cell stack, which converts hydrogen to electricity. Currently Toyota is the only mainstream manufacturer offering an FCEV in the UK, the Mirai saloon, costing £64,690.

Back in 2013, UK H2 Mobility predicted there would be 1.6 million hydrogen vehicles on Britain's roads by 2030. However, BEV technology has since come to dominate the race for zero-emissions propulsion, and so far this year no FCEVs have been sold in the UK.

Globally the picture is not much better, with sales of all FCEVs (including lorries and buses) falling 22% last year to 12,866, according to figures published by Hydrogen Insights.

By contrast, 32,378 battery-electric cars were sold in the UK in May alone, new figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders show.

Proponents of hydrogen including BMW and Toyota argue that FCEV technology is needed to allow the entire vehicle market to shift to zero-emissions propulsion.

“Our research shows that customers would be people who drive longer distances and those who live in the cities,” Guldner said. “Our strategy is to have a second technology in our portfolio, then people can choose which one they want.”

Producers meanwhile argue that creating green hydrogen is a great way to store renewable energy in those unpredictable periods when too much electricity is being generated.

A range of obstacles remain in the way – some solvable, others less so. The high cost of FCEV technology would come down if the demand were there, Guldner said.

The company is also comfortable packaging large enough high-pressure tanks into the body structure to give decent range, currently below that of a diesel equivalent. 

However, car companies alone can’t nudge the infrastructure in the right direction, and those are best placed to find the money are finding it very difficult after what happened to EV charger companies. They raised a lot of investment to spend on building an infrastructure that turned to be too big for initial demand. 

“A lot of those businesses are really struggling today,” Christopher Jackson, CEO of Protium, a green hydrogen provider, said at the same London event. “Then you come in as a hydrogen player and tell the investors 'well, we're going to do something that sounds the same as that'. It is a harder story.”

Protium is currently building three hydrogen fuelling stations, aimed at filling lorries, and predicts a big jump in demand between 2028 and 2030 as the clock runs down on the government’s net-zero targets.

One problem is that, right now, hydrogen isn’t competing against BEV technology but cheaper fossil-fuelled combustion engines too.

That target customer driving longer distances or street-parked in the city already has their ideal powertrain, and that won’t change until the sale of ICE vehicles running on petrol or diesel is banned in 2035.

Without a government nudge in the form of mandated hydrogen infrastructure or higher tax on fossil fuels or urban bans, the market for FCEVs is essentially dormant until that date. 

There’s no help here from influential government advisers the Climate Change Committee. 

“We see only a very niche, if any, role [for hydrogen] in surface transport,” it said in its Seventh Carbon Budget, a long term vision for the future of decarbonisation.

Those suppliers that banked on a speedier ramp-up are suffering as vehicle manufacturers dial back their plans.

For example, French supply giant Forvia, a joint-venture partner of Stellantis and Michelin in fuel-cell maker Symbio, has reduced its investment spend.

“The market does not move as quickly as we assumed two to three years ago.” CEO Martin Fischer said on his company’s earnings call in May. “We are adjusting our efforts to these new realities.”

Meanwhile OPmobility (formerly Plastic Omnium), a supplier of hydrogen tanks for Stellantis vans, also said on its earnings call that it was reducing the speed of its production ramp-up “because of some delays coming from customers”.

In the UK, fuel-cell stack specialist Johnson Matthey booked a £100 million impairment in its investments in fuel-cells for the 2024 financial year after deciding not to open its repurposed Royston plant, affecting 400 jobs.

It also said it had slashed its fuel-cell investment “to maintenance levels of no more than £5m per annum from FY2025/26 with no additional growth investment planned”.

“We had basically restructured the business because the growth wasn't coming as originally forecast,” CEO Liam Condon said on the company’s earnings call in May. 

In February, Renault's and Plug Power’s hydrogen van joint venture, Hyvia, when into liquidation, citing the “too-slow evolution of hydrogen mobility ecosystems in Europe and the very significant development costs required for H2 innovation”.

Supply giant Valeo meanwhile is pessimistic about hydrogen propulsion ever working.

“We do not believe that there will be hydrogen used in vehicles in the short term. We do not believe that hydrogen will be useful for road transportation,” CEO Christophe Périllat said on his company’s earnings call in May.

One reason cited was the much higher amount of electricity needed to create green hydrogen compared with filling a battery.

“We believe that the process for producing hydrogen is extremely ineffective,” Périllat said.

Those in the business are not giving up hope, however, and are betting on the inability to electric to decarbonise the UK to the extent that the government wants by 2050.

It just needs someone – ideally the government – to make the first move and guarantee a market.

Protium’s Jackson said: “Ultimately money flows pretty quickly once we start seeing returns.”