Riversimple, a hydrogen vehicle manufacturer, has unvieled it latest car in London. The car will be leased with fuel and repair costs included, at £200 per month, and its designs will be made available online. The manufacturers hope that this will mean that the cars can be built and improved locally. The cars are targeted to be in production in 2013 and 10 prototypes will be released next year.
The Riversimple car is intended for urban areas. It travels to a speed of 50 miles per hour
and has an energy efficiency equivalent to 300 miles to the gallon. The car can travel 200 miles befor it needs re-fuelling.
Riversimple has partnered with BOC, the gas supplier, to install hydrogen stations for the cars in the city where the prototypes are launched.
The car amalgamates automotive design. It has four motors, powered by a six kilowatt fuel cell, a huge improvement on existing designs, and uses "ultracapacitors", to store and release the energy needed to accelerate a car. The same ultracapacitors also capture energy when the car breaks. The car weighs 350 kg lightened by the absence of a combustion engine, no large fuel tanks and its carbon fibre shell.
The leasing model where fuel and repairs are included is intended to force the manufacturer to produce a long-lasting, fuel-efficient, high-quality product. The concept of leasing is becoming more accepted in environmental thinking especially as manufacturers have to grapple with disposal costs.
Its partnership with BOC resolves the issue of making hydrogen fuel accessible to the public.
"You can incrementally put in a template package of one re-fuellling point and 50 cars in different cities, and each city one by one can build an urban hydrogen infrastructure, and that incrementally builds a nationwide infrastructure," said Hugo Spowers, the former race car designer who conceived the Riversimple idea in 1999.
The company will distribute the engineering designs to the 40 Fires foundation, a not-for-profit organisation that will make the designs "open source".
The idea, they say, is to allow local manufacturing in small plants. This stands in contrast to the "economies of scale" that drive current plants to huge sizes and workforces.
The agreement will be such that if the designs are improved by a local manufacturer, those improvements will be sent back, so that what the company refers to as its "network of manufacturers" can contribute to the overall development of the product line.
