Ten years ago, Swiss top watch industrialist Nicolas Hayek -- boss of Swatch Group which owns several brands including Omega -- broke into the car market with the Smart car, a cool compact city car he co-developed with DaimlerChrysler. The car was cute, but it didn't match Hayek's design (he wanted a hybrid, Daimler went for a gasoline car) and cost expectations, and Swatch pulled out.

Now Hayek -- widely credited with re-making the Swiss watch industry into the world's leader after a deep crisis in the 1980s -- is back with a new (and so far secret) plan, which my colleague Alain Jeannet and myself have revealed and detailed in recent issues of the Swiss magazine L'Hebdo (the most recent article, 5-pages, 1.3 MB PDF in French, can be downloaded here): Hayek is teaming up with PSI, a division of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, with Groupe E, a Swiss regional utility, and other partners (including, probably, Deutsche Bank) to develop an ultra-efficient and cheap fuel cell engine. A joint company will be incorporated in the coming weeks, and actor/activist George Clooney has already agreed to become one of the public faces of the project.

Contrary to the Smart project, however, Hayek says that he won't try to develop a car: he and his partners will stick with developing the engine, and plan to sell it to all car manufacturers -- the engine as an off-the-shelf component (Hayek is applying a watchmaking strategy here).

The weak spot of fuel cells is the provision of hydrogen. Currently, most of it is produced by burning oil, coal or natural gas: not a "green" approach. The Hayek alliance is also working on perfecting an electrolyzer capable of splitting water into H2 and O2 by using solar energy, captured through photovoltaic panels. A prototype has already proved the feasibility of this approach.