Hugo Spowers didn’t just want to reinvent the car, he wanted to reshape car ownership as well. Even Tesla’s Elon Musk himself would goggle at the scale of the work Spowers’ company Riversimple has given itself.
The proposed car is a two-seat, carbon-fibre fuel-cell coupe that’s been uppermost in this former race-team owner’s life since he first set up the company in 2001. Since then the project, now based in Llandrindnod Wells, central Wales, has sucked in £20 million of investment funds and seen the projected production start date pushed back multiple times.
The Rasa’s fuel-cell powertrain with the additional acceleration boosting ‘supercapacitor’ batteries (which release power very quickly) and in-wheel electric motors is radical enough but Spowers doesn’t dwell on this, calling it ‘off-the-shelf’ technology.
Instead, Riversimple's breakthrough is said to be at a ‘system’ level.