Small is beautiful

Hugo Spowers, founder and creator of the Riversimple hydrogen-powered car, is a man with a grand plan and that plan is to keep things simple. Confused? Stay with us. Riversimple is in the process of raising finance to build and pilot fifty of its hydrogen vehicles and one refuelling point in a small UK city. Hugo says this will be followed up by carbon copy projects in other cities.

“We think the 'small is beautiful approach' works. You should concentrate all your resources in one small city and demonstrate success there. If you can roll that out as a template package to other cities, you can incrementally build the skeleton of a nationwide network, without ever taking a gamble to scale bigger than one city at a time,” Hugo says.

The whole shebang
One perennial problem for a lot of sustainable mobility projects is the chicken-and-egg scenario: people put off buying, in this case, hydrogen cars, because of the patchy refuelling infrastructure; while at the same time, people are loathe to invest in a refuelling infrastructure if there aren’t enough vehicles to support it. Riversimple gets round the problem by providing both at the same time.

Riversimple’s ‘package’ is not just some shiny new hydrogen cars, the company actually comes and builds the refuelling stations to support them, with the help of industrial gases company BOC, which is part-funding the project. Hugo’s approach brings both the cars and the fuelling stations to the city together, so instead of chicken or egg, you get chicken and egg.

No ultra speed
Earlier in his career Hugo designed, built and drove racing cars, but he has no need for ultra speed anymore. Now a simple and steady approach wins the race for him. Hugo says that a gradual roll-out makes commercial sense because it made it easier for the infrastructure companies to invest, like BOC is doing.

Although the Riversimple car is perfect for the urban jungle, Hugo’s long-term goal is inter-city cars that will have a maximum cruising speed of between 75 and eighty miles per hour (120-130 kilometres per hour).

“The car will be comparable to any vehicle on the road up to eighty mph; it just won’t get any faster. Why would you need to?” he asks.

Compare
Despite his enthusiasm, Hugo does not think hydrogen will completely take over the world. He says there’s a compelling argument for battery vehicles in cities and the two will co-exist in the future. He’s also adamant that batteries and motorways don’t mix, and will never mix.

So what’s so different between the Riversimple vehicle and the Honda Clarity, for example? Well, Hugo’s again thinking small. His vehicle uses a far smaller fuel cell than the hundred kilowatt system that can be found in the Honda and other similar industry prototypes that require more hydrogen to be stored on board and in fuelling stations.

The Riversimple vehicle weighs just 350 kilogrammes and contains a fuel cell of only six kilowatt – with the majority of the power for acceleration provided by a bank of ultra-capacitors.

Taken for a ride
What happens when there’s a problem with one of the ultra-capacitors, or anything on the vehicle for that matter? Simple, Riversimple will fix it.

As part of the roll-out, the cars aren’t being sold, but leased. For around two hundred pounds a month, fuel and repair costs are included in the cost, which is good news for drivers fed up with being taken for a ride by motor mechanics.

“We want to do everything right, rather than everything quickly. Slow and simple is the way forward,” says Hugo.