Hugo Spowers puts down his foot and accelerates to 60mph. The 50-year-old former racing driver concentrates on the Tarmac in front of him, carefully pursuing the optimum -- meaning fastest -- route. He calls his driving technique "following the racing line", but there are no competitors behind him, no cheering roadside crowds. Nor are we at Brands Hatch or Silverstone -- we're tearing a long a country lane in Herefordshire, and those green flashes by the side of the road are hedgerows. "That's an excellent corner, that one," says the one time Formula Three driver as he emerges from a bend between his home in Titley and his office in Ludlow.
Look a little closer, though, and you see that Spowers isn't some shameless petrolhead. The car, an Audi A2 he bought online and collected from Munich, is no ordinary hatchback: it's a special "three-litre" model, meaning it uses, on average, just three litres of fuel per 100km.
The lightweight aluminium vehicle has low rolling-resistance tyres and a small 1.2-litre turbo diesel engine, and saves fuel by turning itself off when the car is stationary and starting again when the accelerator is pressed.
Spowers says he's slower than he used to be. These days it's not time that absorbs him, it's a small gauge by the speedometer that reads 91.7 miles per gallon [3.08 litres per 100km]. "It's become a challenge," Spowers says. "Rather than competing against the clock, I'm competing against the mileage meter. My record is 130 mpg [1.81 litres/100km] for two drives."
This preoccupation with fuel consumption isn't a diversion.
Spowers is on a mission that goes beyond saving a few miles per gallon. He seeks the eradication of the internal combustion engine. "The best engines in the world are 25 percent efficient," he says. "You have to wean yourself off something that is 25 per cent efficient as your prime mover." So he plans to bring hydrogen transport to the masses through his company River simple, which, according to its website, intends to "build and operate cars for independent use whilst systematically pursuing the elimination of the environmental damage caused by personal transport."While Honda and
Mercedes-Benz build million-pound state-of-the-art hydrogen- fuel-cell cars, Spowers is attempting to rip up the auto industry's design and business- model rule books and start again. His company is creating an entirely new car from the tyres up, developing an innovative business model and trying to beat the world's most powerful automakers to market with a budget of £20 million and a staff of eight.
Riversimple's office in a converted mill is anunlikely incubation lab for the future of the car industry. Below a huge triangular window, which looks out over the River Teme, retired couples sit at a café sipping tea. Rosie Reeve, Riversimple's sustainability officer, 27, has brought in her own chair. The community engagement officer, Will Cornwallis, 28, is fixing the phone system while designing promotional leaflets on screen. The humble appearance belies the firm's ambition to have its first 30 hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered cars operating in Leicester by spring 2012.
Spowers, who has neck-length black hair, is wearing his uniform of jeans and woolly jumper, and is making a phone call (discussing equipment purchases) to his workshop 150kmaway in Silverstone. The workshop, in a garage shared with the Alan Docking Racing Superleague Formula team, contains Riversimple's first "technology demonstrator". Spowers is insistent that it's not a prototype, as the finished car "probably won't have a single shared component".
It's a city car with a difference. Not only does it use a hydrogen fuel cell to generate the electricity to power its four wheel-mounted electric motors, but it also benefits from Spowers's philosophy of "whole system design".
Manufacturers such as Mercedes-Benz are trying to shoehorn large, powerful fuel cells into existing cars such as the B-Class in order to create models with a range and performance similar to internal combustion cars. But Riversimple's blueprint is singular in its purpose: an urban vehicle created for short journeys.
Automotive hydrogen fuel cells, a relatively new technology, are produced in small numbers, which means they're expensive. The more power a fuel cell needs to produce, the more complicated it is to make, and the more platinum it contains. That puts up the price. "The cost of the fuel cell is roughly proportional to the power," explains Ben Todd, UK MD of Shanghai company Horizon, which supplied the fuel cells in Riversimple's technology demonstrator. "If a fuel cell is ten times more powerful, it will be ten times the price."
Mercedes-Benz has around 200 fuel-cell B-Class cars in and around Stuttgart, powered by 100kW cells. According to Mercedes spokesman Rob Halloway, this gives the "same effective power as a 2.0-litre car", but he estimates the cost of each B-Class at more than €1 million. Riversimple's fuel cell produces just 6kW, so is vastly cheaper. Spowers claims the cells will cost just $3,000-5,000.
How can the Riversimple car require such little power? Spowers identifies two smart aspects of the design. First, the car is conceived as a whole system, rather than adapted from combustion engine car designs -- a process known as "mass decompounding". The car's small size and carbon-fibre bodywork keep down its weight, eliminating the need for powerful brakes and power-steering systems, which further reduces weight. So the fuel cell needs to be less powerful, and it can be smaller, which makes the car lighter still. Second, Riversimple plans to produce vehicles based on what it calls a "network electric platform". This is designed to avoid the surplus power present in petrol or diesel vehicles, which adds size, weight and complexity.
In a traditional car, the internal combustion engine is used for both acceleration and maintaining cruising speed. If you want to accelerate faster, you need more power. More power means the car has a higher top speed, one that is faster than most people will ever travel. "When you're cruising on the motorway, a car uses only 15 to 20 percent of its peak power," Spowers explains. "It means you have an engine five times bigger and heavier than it needs to be for90per cent of the vehicle's life. You also have a gearbox strong enough for that peak power, five times stronger than it needs to be. Then you need a body strong enough to retain these heavy bits in accidents."
Riversimple uses a fuel cell with only enough power to maintain the car's top speed of 50mph -- sufficient for the city and suburbs. It relies on a bank of ultra capacitors on the floor, under the driver's seat, to store the power needed for acceleration. The ultra capacitors recharge from the fuel cell and from capturing around 50 per cent of the energy generated when braking: the electric motors in each wheel turn into generators when scrubbing off speed. Wasteful friction brakes are activated only under 5km/h and strong braking over 0.3-G. In a regular car, energy flows from the fuel tank, through the engine and gearbox and out through the wheels; in the Riversimple design, it can flow in any direction apart from back into the fuel cell. This is the "network effect".
However, such clever energy saving counts for little if you cannot fuel your vehicle in the first place. Spowers is effectively launching a hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered vehicle before a refuelling network is in place. The major car manufacturers' plans lag behind Riversimple's by a couple of years. A September 2009 "letter of understanding" signed by representatives of Daimler, Ford, GM, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Renault/Nissan and Toyota, addressed to "Oil and Energy Companies and Government Organisations", outlines the motor companies' wish to commercialise hydrogen vehicles "by 2015".
It also stipulates the need for "a hydrogen infrastructure network with sufficient density... required by 2015".
But instead of waiting for a national network of refuelling stations, Riversimple plans to start by producing 30cars -- with speeds of up to 50mph and a 240-mile range -- for use in and around Leicester, a city that will have a single refuelling station. The company chose Leicester partly because of its can-do attitude, which, Spowers says, led to "an open, co-operative relationship where we have a shared interest in doing something", and partly because of its size. "If you stick with medium-sized cities -- 100,000 to 300,000 people -- then one strategically sited refuelling station is enough," Spowers says. "It's an entirely practical proposition to visit once a week." Thus, he explains, a fuel-cell-car business becomes viable. "If you do a city car, the critical scale of infrastructure is one city. If you have cars that can go on motorways, the critical scale is the whole country." As the number of cities with hydrogen refuelling stations grows, says Spowers, the skeleton of a network will appear.
This doesn't mean the city cars will be able to drive between cities -- rather, enough of a refuelling network will exist to create a market for a hydrogen-fuel-cell car designed for intercity use. Riversimple's literature claims it plans to launch an intercity car by 2015 -- but Spowers stresses that this date needs to be flexible, as "there are too many factors out of our control".
Spowers's background doesn't explain why he became an entrepreneur advocating affordable and sustainable transport.
During his late twenties, he was known for high-society parties at his parents' estate in Windlesham, Surrey. The Hon Alexandra Foley, Hugo's friend for more than 20 years, describes a party he held in 1990. "It was a fancy-dress party, very avant-garde, with people like George Melly walking around. It was in
Tatler." Besides, Spowers's passion had always been motor racing, a sport not known for its environmental credibility.
In 1984 he set up Prowess Racing, designing, building and racing his own cars. Financial support came from sponsors. In 1995, with a sponsorship deal from Japanese natural- cosmetics firm Hinoki Shinyaku, he ran a Formula Three car for eight races of the 1995 season featuring an anti-smoking campaign and a character called The Extinguisher."The idea was to promote an image of not smoking being the smart choice to make for youngsters," Spowers says. "Motorsport sponsorship promoted smoking as the smart, cool choice of winners, and there was nobody countering that message."
His plan was to attract sponsorship from companies that wouldn't normally touch motor racing, due to its elitist, profligate and dangerous image.
But motor racing wasn't ready to give up the tobacco. The Extinguisher was due to race at Silverstone on the weekend of July 16, 1995.The night before, according to Spowers, he attended a ball at Easton Neston, where a senior member of the British Racing Drivers' Club ranted at him about the importance of tobacco sponsorship.
By this time Spowers found he had become far more interested in social responsibility than shaving tenths of a second off his lap times. He was struggling to reconcile motor racing with his conscience, having developed an interest in ecology during his formative years gardening at Windlesham. "I spent years defending myself at dinner with friends, arguing that motorsport is all about efficiency -- if you want a quicker car, you create more power by burning fuel more efficiently," he says. Despite this, he began to realise the inherent limitations of combustion engines. "You've got piston rings going up and down bores, thousands of times per minute. That is using an awful lot of energy. We've got to break free from that."
The turning point came in 1992, when he was flying back from a race meeting in California to New York and read a book called
Uncommon Wisdom by Fritjof Capra. Despite having been up the whole of the night before, he stayed awake all flight, reading. "It was one of the most exciting books I'd read in of "big ideas, world-view ideas with a range of different and fascinating people.
Ideas of huge import to today's problems."
Four years later, in 1996, he enrolled on a five week course hosted by Capra at Schumacher College in Totnes, Devon. Capra introduced him to "systems thinking" -- the idea that complex systems can have emergent properties that are impossible to predict from examining the component parts. "However much you understand the elements of a system, it cannot predict the behaviour of the whole," he says. Spowers gives the example of common salt. "There's no rational explanation for the behaviour of salt as a life-giving mineral when it's composed of a poisonous gas and a metal that floats and burns in water."
This idea was the push he needed. Building an environmentally responsible car would require a new approach to engineering and a new way of thinking. Spowers went back to university to take an MBA at Cranfield University in Bedfordshire. For his 1999 project, in which he outlined the basics of a lightweight fuel-cell car, his supervisor was the visiting professor of corporate strategy, John Constable, now the chairman of Riversimple. Constable was impressed with Spowers's ideas. "I was fascinated," he says. "It's unusual for somebody to be as original as that. The auto industry still seemed dominant. He came up with what can only be described as a complete alternative in every sense."
The Ludlow office reveals the depth of the team's environmental concerns. The mill below turns a generator that produces 2kW of electricity, the shelving comes from managed forests in Sweden and the kettle is an energy-saving model. The two full-time office staff, Cornwall is and Reeve are passionate about green issues, with, respectively, degrees in environmental geology and natural sciences. According to his wife Fiona, Spowers's strengths include "picking up" such committed people. "He's extremely good at meeting people and gelling with them and keeping that connection," she says. "If he meets someone and they have an interesting conversation, Hugo always follows up. He collects interesting people."
Spowers's ability to make contacts helps explain the impressive array of people he assembled for a gathering in late 2000 that signalled the beginnings of the Riversimple project.
At the time, Spowers organised a meeting, chaired by Constable, at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London. The ideas that came out of the meeting convinced Spowers to go full time on the project. He attributes the fact that he was able to get the project going to his wife. As "director of disruption" at advertising agency TBWA, she could provide insights into how to break into a market as mature as the auto sector, and her support meant he was able to pursue the project without the pressure of an external investor.
The following year, Charles Morgan of the Morgan Motor Company contacted Spowers with a view to building a fuel-cell car based on its Aero 8 sports car. This came to be called the LIFE Car (Lightweight Fuel Efficient Car). Spowers felt that building a working car would be a step towards securing the funding he would need for his future company; nobody was going to take him seriously unless he could demonstrate that a fuel-cell car could work. "Nobody will give you the money until you've given them a vehicle they can drive in," Spowers says. The project "was critical to make everything happen".
The LIFECar concept -- a complete car, but suitable only for lab-based not road-going testing -- was eventually launched at the 2008 Geneva Motor Show. But the project was complicated. It took three years to raise the money to design and build the car, and funding had to come from a number of sources.
The hardest sum to extract was from the government. Spowers's consortium, consisting of his company Oscar Automotive, Morgan, Cranfield University and BOC, had a budget of £1.2 million. They put in a bid for half of this from the Department for Transport's Foresight Vehicle programme in March 2003. According to the department's website, the purpose of the now-defunct programme was "to bring together UK resources and expertise to create components and systems for the vehicles of the future". Unfortunately, after initially promising Spowers's consortium the £600,000 needed to design and build the LIFECar, the Foresight Vehicle programme stalled with the payment. Critically, Spowers received a letter in May2004sayingfundinghadbeen refused. It was a disaster. "Everything was bound up in this bid," Spowers says. The grounds for rejection were that the car "wasn't innovative enough" as it contained no technologies that were new on their own. Spowers's frustration with the DfT is still evident: "The whole point of the proposal is we're showing a fuel-cell car is possible using existing technologies." Spowers remained determined to make the project happen.
Alexandra Foley remembers him as particularly focused individual, even during his partying days -- if Spowers wanted to blow up a grand piano in the middle of a lake, then he would make it happen. "He's a very driven person," she says. In October 2004 he added two members to the consortium -- Oxford University and QinetiQ -- and applied for a grant from the Technology Strategy Board, part of the Department of Trade and Industry. This time he was successful, and in March 2005 was offered£900,000.The LIFECar project could go ahead. Riversimple's current technology demonstrator is based heavily on knowledge gained developing the LIFECar. Funding remains achallenge.The main problem is Riversimple's business model:
Spowers's long-term view makes the company hard to sell to investors who are after a return in a couple of years.
Nevertheless, he isn't interested in an immediate return; he wants to build a long term hydrogen- car business.
In order to make a viable business based around building state-of-the-art vehicles, Riversimple has adopted a "sale of service" model. The cars will never be sold to consumers -- instead, drivers (Riversimple prefers "users") will lease the cars directly from the company for around £200-£250 a month, plus a set charge of around 15p per mile [9p per km]. "If we try to sell these cars, they'll be far too expensive," Spowers says. He believes that, despite the high initial cost of building the cars -- high-tech composite bodies don't come cheap -- the company will make more money than traditional manufacturers in the long run.
This is because, according to Spowers, the income generated throughout the car's life will all go back to Riversimple. "Only 40 per cent of the lifetime revenue streams generated by a car actually go through the manufacturer," he says, explaining that the rest is swallowed up by, for example, second-hand traders and independent garages.
The sale-of-service model also suits the "elimination of environmental damage" part of Riversimple's manifesto. It is in the company's interest for its cars to last as long as possible, as the longer it is in use, the more the leasing fees will offset the high initial construction cost. Spowers wants the cars to last at least 15 years -- with several upgrades during that period. The eventual plan is to push the sale-of-service model up the chain, so the car's components are also leased from the suppliers. Spowers feels this will align the interests of Riversimple with its suppliers'. "If we lease the fuel cells from the fuel cell manufacturer, we have a shared interest in designing longevity into the product. The longer they can persuade us to keep the fuel cell, the more money they make."
The problem with the model, at least from an investor's point of view, is the conflict between the upfront cost of building thousands of expensive fuel- cell cars and the drip feed return over a period of several years. This was apparent in a June 2010 meeting during the second round of funding -- the purpose of which was to raise £20 million for, among other things, the development and construction of the 30 Leicester vehicles. The meeting, in a bookshelf-lined room in Mayfair, was between Spowers, Cynthia Hung, who is managing the second funding round, and an investment banker with access to valuable financial contacts. The banker was intrigued, but was worried that investors would balk at the company's five-years plus wait for returns -- and that many would like to see a return in two to three years. "VCs couldn't give a monkey's," says Spowers. He is, however, adamant that the returns will be huge, as long as investors wait long enough. "We're being paid monthly for every car we've made in the past 15 years, so the short-term impact is very small," Spowers says. "The auto industry would give its right arm to be paid for every car it's made in the past 15 years."
It's a risky strategy, and it's asking a lot of investors to put so much faith in a start-up with such big ideas. Spowers is used to taking risks, though. When bungee jumping from a crane with the Oxford Dangerous Sports Club in1983, his love of risk almost killed him. After choosing the right length -- 20 metres -- by comparing his bodyweight against the elastic properties of his rope, Spowers decided to up the ante by adding another six metres to the end. He hit the ground back-first at a velocity equivalent to having jumped off a 22-metre high building. He broke his back, neck and pelvis in two places, smashed ten teeth and was unconscious for 24 hours.
Riversimple continues his tradition of risk taking -- despite making a complicated high-tech car; it doesn't intend to make money from patenting the design. Instead, the CAD files will be hostedon40fires.org- a not-for profit foundation setup by, but independent from, Riversimple -- for anyone to download.
The plan is to encourage other companies to build their own fuel-cell-powered cars, thus helping to eliminate internal combustion. The company is also keen to build a community to contribute to the car's design. Users will be able to upload their own schematics, screenshots and videos, and others will be able to respond with designs of their own. As with open-source software, the free availability of the designs will allow the cars to be modified according to users' needs -- which will help manufacturers adapt a car for its target market. A UK vehicle may not need air conditioning, but this would be important in Australia -- so a manufacturer in Melbourne may add solar panels to the roof to help power the climate control.
The open approach is not without its problems. The first is technical. Nico Sergent, 28, an engineer for Riversimple who spends much of histimeworkingon40Fires, is frustrated by the lack of open CAD standards. "Standardisation is a big problem," Sergent says. "I've been working with different software on different computers and it's impossible to move from one to another."
The second problem is legal. Riversimple has not yet decided under what kind of licence to distribute its designs. Open hardware is a comparatively new concept compared to software, and no one has applied it, so far, to anything as complicated as a car. There is a debate on 40 Fires as to whether the car's designs should be available under a General Public Licence (GPL)-style permit. Any project that uses or modifies GPL-licensed code has itself to be distributed under the terms of the GPL -- which specifies that it must remain free to distribute and to modify.
According to Patrick Andrews, Riversimple's corporate secretary, attaching this kind of licence to the designs on 40 Fires may put off manufacturers designing components for Riversimple, as they would then have to give away the designs."If there's a GPL-style licence, people will be less willing to invest," he says.
Andrews, 47, is keen on encouraging people to collaborate. He thinks one way to achieve this is to take a similar approach to the Open Invention Network. This aids the development of Linux by buying up related patents and making them available royalty-free to participating companies, in return asking that those companies do not assert their own patents against Linux-based software.
According toAndrews, 40Fires may patent "certain core systems" -- making them free to contributors to 40 Fires.
Withapledgetoget30fullyworking and road-legal cars on to the streets by 2012, there's plenty of work to do. A visit to Riversimple's workshop the day before the Leicester partnership is announced reveals some teething problems. Engineer John Bevan emerges from under the car looking flustered after battling with the electrics. Outside, meanwhile, it starts to tip it down. This prompts some anxious checking of the weather forecast -- the vehicle is a technology demonstrator rather than a finished car, so the sensitive electronics don't have weatherproofing. Spowers and his small team may have a plan to take on the might of the car and oil industries but, for the moment, beating the Leicester rain is top priority.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
