Reframing the automobiles of the future

An interview with Hugo Spowers, from Riversimple, reveals a new possibility for the future of car design and hydrogen fuel cells.

In a time when the dominance of the powerful car industry is collapsing in America, it’s captivating to meet inspired designers who are working on new niche concept cars that could well have a huge influence on the way we conceptualize, design and produce cars in the future.

Riversimple is based in the UK, but their imagination is based far beyond any borders. Their aspirations to use a more collaborative, open source process for their R&D sets them apart from an aging industry built on competitiveness and secrecy. And their prototype hydrogen fuel cell sports car, built by Morgan (a famous sports car maker in England) has been redesigned from the ground up, using all of the new ideas available to them.

I first met Hugo Spowers, who heads Riversimple, last year. When Hugo left motor sports with an interest in designing environmentally sustainable cars, he only knew about battery technologies, which was the domain of, in his words, “big companies with big labs and big budgets”.

Then in ’97 he met Paul Hawken, author of ‘Natural Capitalism’, and Amory Lovins from the Rocky Mountain Institute, and he learned of [hydrogen] fuel cells. According to Hugo:

I’d never heard of them before – and I realised that actually the real opportunities, fuel cells, lay not in fundamental science, a fuel cell technology or anything like that, but in system integration, by a pattern of components in an architecture, and putting the bits together in a different way.

A hydrogen fuel cell doesn't behave like a petrol engine

Hugo also realised that the mainstream car companies are hard pressed to go this route that he sees as technically possible.

There’s no slight on them because there’s clearly some very bright people there but they have got an awful lot of legacy constraints and exit barriers from doing what they’re doing, and they have to incrementally move from the technology that they’re deeply routed in and that they’ve optimised over 80 years forward to a fuel cell future.

And by necessity, that means putting fuel cells into the cars they make. And the cars they make are hugely optimised around the characteristics of the combustion engine, and putting a fuel cell in there, means you have to persuade a fuel cell to behave like a petrol engine, which it doesn’t do very well.

So the technological barriers we’ve spoken about, which are fuel cell cost and fuel cell power density, even more hydrogen power density, I believe, are complete artifices of that design strategy, putting fuel cells into production conventional cars. But they are not true in any absolute sense, and if you take a whole system design approach to designing a car and a fuel cell, those barriers disappear.

Beyond using fuel cells, Hugo thinks new cars will be made of advanced composite materials, such as carbon and Kevlar, which would actually be safer in collisions. Using materials much lighter than steel allows him to build a much lighter car that uses less fuel.

A new sale-of-service business model

He considers a radical change in approach to the traditional way the consumer ‘buys a car’:

I believe that it’s cheaper or more profitable to make cars out of advanced composites without it being more expensive to the customer. And that is because in the whole sale-of-service business model, the manufacturer pays for the hydrogen. We would pay the hydrogen bills when the customer fills up with hydrogen, not the customer himself.

So, what happens is if you build a car in carbon fibre you end up with a much lighter car. So you can have much lighter motors, you can have a smaller fuel cell, lower powered fuel cell, you can have fewer ultra-capacitors because there’s less kinetic energy to store, so you’re saving component costs in the build of the vehicle, but also you’re designing the vehicle for maximum longevity because you want to maximise that revenue stream from each car you make, you want to last as long as possible out there in the market and all the time you’re paying for the fuel, so the more efficient the vehicle is, the more money you make. Or the greater your margin. So if you make it out of lighter material you make a much bigger margin added to the reduced component costs of making the vehicle it means that actually that more than offsets the increased cost of the carbon fibre upfront.

Hugo’s sale-of-service business model is an interesting one that is being used in other manufacturing areas, such as by Shaw Carpets. In this new model, you guarantee the relationship between the manufacturer and the consumer. According to Hugo:

It puts the manufacturers and the consumer interests in alignment. Because at the moment if you want the car to be as expensive and unreliable and high-maintenance as possible they’re completely opposed, whereas this way you completely align the interests of the two parties and suddenly you’re on the same side.

What I find the most refreshing about Hugo is his overwhelming sense of optimism. He’s hugely excited by the future and the opportunities he sees ahead. He’s also convinced that culture is changing.  “I am absolutely sure that cultural shift will happen even more quickly than we imagine, if you think about the cultural shift about SUVs in the last few years, it’s happened remarkably quickly.”

Riversimple unveiled their new hydrogen-powered urban vehicle in London on June 16th, 2009.

You can listen to the full interview on our podcast.

Blake, for We Are Futureproof