Interview: Riversimple on hydrogen’s role in the future of transport

When it comes to the future of sustainable mobility, lithium batteries often take centre stage — but what about other sustainable energy sources?

We recently spoke with Hugo Spowers from the sustainable hydrogen car company, Riversimple, to learn a bit more about hydrogens' role in the future of transport and sustainability.

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Who are Riversimple are and what you do?

Riversimple is a company developing hydrogen cars, but we’d like to stress the fact we’re not a hydrogen car company, we’re a sustainable car company. I got out of motor racing for environmental reasons and I set up Riversimple to develop hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, because I felt that it was a real opportunity, played to my skills and nobody else was really doing it very well.

We’re pursuing hydrogen cars because I believe they have a critical role to play in a sustainable transport future rather than because we are a hydrogen car company.

Riversimple’s aim is ‘mobility with zero cost to the planet.’ Can you tell us how you’re working towards this?

Yes, in our ‘articles of association,’ our purpose is defined very specifically as to ‘systematically pursue the elimination of the environmental impact of personal transport,’ and the two keywords there are ‘elimination’ because we don’t regard reduction as a sufficient goal, being less unsustainable is still not sustainable, but clearly, we’re not going to get there overnight. So ‘systematically’ is the other keyword. We’ve got to make sure that every investment we make is taking us towards that end goal rather than down a blind alley.

It’s all too easy to go for the low hanging fruit and to end up with a less impactful solution that can never be zero impact and then you’ve got to write off all the investment you’ve made in getting to that interim solution and start all over again. So we’re very focused on a long-term vision.

Can you explain to us how hydrogen fuel works in a car?

So a hydrogen vehicle is still an electric vehicle, but it doesn’t have any batteries, instead of storing all the energy in a battery we store all the energy in hydrogen that you can easily fill up in a few minutes just like filling a petrol tank, and that hydrogen is then used through a fuelcell to combine with air but without burning and giving off all the energy instead of as heat, giving it off as electricity going to the motor. So you’re creating electricity on demand, and it’s exactly the same as electrolysis but in reverse, so the old experiment, you pass electricity through water to split the water molecule and out comes hydrogen and oxygen, in a fuel cell, you put the hydrogen and oxygen back in and allow them to combine without burning, and they give off the energy as electricity and the product of water.

Can you tell us about the benefits of a hydrogen-powered car?

The benefits are really in terms of the weight of the energy you’ve got to carry to give you a decent range — so long-range possibilities and quick refuel time. Vehicles with high utilization or long-range need hydrogen really, and the government has reached the conclusion quite correctly that we need hydrogen for HGV’s (heavy goods vehicles), but they’ve reached that conclusion for entirely the wrong reasons. It’s nothing to do with them being large.

You can easily make a battery electric HGV if you’re happy to do 50 miles a day, but it’s not what HGV’s do. It’s the range and the utilization ‘the uptime,’ they don’t have the time for charging to run on batteries, and the same is true right across the board, driving from London to Edinburgh it’ s much more effective and efficient to use hydrogen than batteries.

Can you tell us what the driving experience is like in one of these hydrogen-powered cars?

It’s quite fun actually, it’s a very lightweight car, it’s got a very rigid chassis, it’s got very good suspension. We’re largely from a motor racing background so we weren’t going to build a boring car after all, and it’s got very good acceleration up to 60 miles an hour, nine and a half seconds.

It doesn’t go more than 60 miles an hour, it’s designed for local use and on country roads, it’s great fun! It’s not designed for motorway travel.

Can you tell us how infrastructure might need to change in order to accommodate a company such as Riversimple?

There’s clearly the chicken and egg of who’s going to put in the infrastructure for the cars and vice versa, but we are very confident that it’s much less of a barrier than the infrastructure for rolling out battery charging for 30 million+ cars in the UK.

It’s relatively simple to replace a petrol pump with a hydrogen pump on the standard forecourt, and it’s the same sort of use and customer relationship — the customer drives in squirting fuel, and five minutes later drives out with 300 miles of range in the tank.

The question is building the business case for the forecourt to install a hydrogen filling pump.

What is your vision for the future of mobility and where does hydrogen come into that?

Well, unusually for a car company I think we’ve got far too many cars in the world, but I don’t believe the answer is no cars. I think that shared access and ‘sweating the asset’ is absolutely critical, but a focus on efficiency is absolutely critical to focus on the carbon intensity of the vehicle’s embedded carbon in making them and the longevity of the vehicle to amortize that embedded carbon is also critical. So all these things to my mind lead to an inevitable change in business model at the moment. If you sell cars, you make more money by selling more cars and ultimately you make more profit by maximizing resource consumption and I don’t see how we can ever have a sustainable industrial society based on rewarding industry for the opposite of what you’re trying to achieve, the business model needs to change even more than the technology.

So the endgame I think is a universe with a much greater variety of solutions and access models for people to cars and it allows people to have maybe their own car as they see it on a contract for three years, but it’s only to meet 90% of their needs because we meet the other 10% of needs with access to a different vehicle when they need them. We don’t want people commuting 48 weeks of the year in a great big estate car on their own simply because they want it for family holidays, once a summer.

So we can have much more functionally specific vehicles rather than meeting a hundred per cent of somebody’s needs. Battery electric vehicles absolutely have a key role to play in local applications. We often hear that 80% of journeys are less than 20 miles and that’s probably true, and we should be using battery vehicles for those sorts of things. But what people don’t find out is that 80% of the miles are driven in the other 20% of journeys, and that’s 80% of the problem and that’s where we need the hydrogen.

Do you think Formula E is a good step towards promoting sustainability?

I think it is, yes, of course, it’s great, and it’s great that people are interested and I think it’s great that it gets the attention on the engineering side into improving performance, and that is undeniably of great value. I just don’t think it’ll ever be quite the sport that motorsport used to be pre-1980.

[James] Well, Flock, we operate in both the Drone and Motor industries and we do know some companies (Airspeeder) who are developing flying cars for flying car racing, that could be an incredible new sport to look out for in the coming years. I know, I can’t wait — I wonder if it’s too late for me to start training up for that now!

Can you tell me if you or Riverimple as a company are particularly inspired by any companies within or outside of the motor industry.

Yes, absolutely. Well, I suppose I ought to start by congratulating Enapter, an electrolyzer company who, yesterday, won one of the Earthshot prizes, and I was surprised and delighted to see our car featured in the intro film for Enapter being refuelled, by an Enapter electrolyzer.

Outside the auto industry, there are plenty of other companies. There’s a firm called Elvis & Kresse who we work with and use some of the materials in our car. They are upstreaming industrial waste streams, so they make all sorts of bags, belts, rugs out of industrial

waste streams, initially from fire hoses, they identified industrial waste streams of consistent product that’s coming out but being thrown away, and their clarity of vision is so impressive! They’re not working on interim solutions, they’re working on something that has a long-term role to play and they’re absolutely single-minded about what they’re doing.

[James] There’s another company which I just thought of actually, which I’m a huge advocate for, I wonder if you’ve heard of them, they’re a drone company called Dendra Systems who we actually work with, they’re Oxford based but operate mostly in Australia — they plant trees across large scale areas that have been affected by forest fires, and these drones can plant trees a hundred times faster than a human — I think they’re excellent and I’m loving seeing all of these new innovations coming out with this tech!

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