Interview Hugo Spowers, Riversimple 1/4
Hugo Spowers – the new
face of the car industry?
As the need to find alternative, cleaner and more sustainable sources to power
the cars on our roads becomes an imperative, one pioneering company is going
back to the drawing board and redesigning the car around the fuel cell
rather than the other way around. Peter McManners finds out more from
Riversimple founding director Hugo Spowers
Hugo Spowers:
faith in hydrogen
fuel cell vehicles
Hugo Spowers is the founding director
of Riversimple, a company with sustainability at its core. In his office, in an old
mill overlooking the River Teme, there
is a table consisting of a sheet of glass
mounted on a Merlin engine crankcase.
This is appropriate furniture for a company continuing the tradition of mouldbreaking British engineering.
The car being developed by Riversimple
is made from carbon fibre composites and
powered by hydrogen fuel cells. This is
every bit as much a game changer for the
car industry as the Merlin engine was to
the course of the Second World War.
Whilst the rest of the car industry is
betting on electric cars in the near term
and funnelling huge amounts of capital into improving fuel cell technology
for the longer term, Spowers insists that
hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are viable,
and needed, now.
This is no flight of fancy or wild idea;
this has come from a deep analysis of
how to build and operate cars to suit the
characteristics of fuel cells – as opposed
to squeezing fuel cells into cars designed
around combustion engines, which
