Riversimple: Building the Hydrogen Car!
Great interview yesterday with Hugo Spowers, the moving spirit behind Riversimple — a tiny company that plans to bring the world's first hydrogen-powered car to market in 2014. The company is a little group of valiant and enormously experienced entrepreneurs and engineers based in Ludlow, Shropshire, a gorgeous mediaeval market town in a forgotten corner of England near the Welsh border. Riversimple has an agreement with the Leicester council and with the county councils of Shropshire and Herefordshire to do a pilot project involving 30 cars in each location — and from there they plan to spread across the country. They've also created a whole new corporate structure, and they give their technology away on the internet, hoping that others in Argentina, Australia and America will pick it up and start building micro-factories for hydrogen cars all over the world. An amazing group.
Nutty? Maybe — but the chairman of the board is Sebastian Piech, whose family is already deep in the auto industry. You may recognize their brand — it's called Porsche.
We'll post the interview with Hugo Spowers later this year.