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 sustain- ability 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 com- pany continuing the tradition of mould- breaking 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 capi- tal 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
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