Interview Hugo Spowers, Riversimple 4/4
“You have to be more successful on the metrics by which success is convention- ally judged. If you are more success- ful, then people will copy you, which is good for us as it builds support for our standards in all their forms. If you are not, you are only ever going to be a niche curiosity which gets the support of the activist green movement. If you can generate economic activity which is more profitable by doing good then you can expect other people to come on board for reasons other than altruism or interest in sustainability.”
So is there a need for forward thinkers to break down the barriers? “You need to think pretty laterally to come up with these solutions, because none of them work very well in isolation; the key is the
system-level integration. You are more likely to do this if you are interested in sustainability, but simple logic dictates that sustainability is rather important anyway; you don’t have to be an eco- activist.”
So what is the future? “I imagine a world with a much larger number of regionally-specific vehicle manufactur- ers. We won’t be the next Ford or Toyota, although I would like to think we will be the Hoover in the marketplace, in that we are the ones that started this model of fuel-cell technology; but we are not a fuel cell car company, we are a sustaina- ble car company.”
We won’t be the next Ford. I’d like to think we will be the Hoover in the marketplace, in that we are the ones that started this model of fuel-cell technology
The Riversimple seven-point approach 1. Develop and build highly efficient vehi- cles, based on a Network Electric design, constructed from carbon composites and powered by hydrogen fuel cells. 2. Sell mobility as a service, not a car as a product.
3. Adopt this ‘sale of service’ model upstream through our supply chain. 4. Grow infrastructure city by city. 5. Manufacture vehicles in small-scale dis- tributed facilities. 6. Open source design and development. 7. Corporate structure designed to ensure better governance standards.
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