Mobile upgrade: the hydrogen car you lease like an iPhone

For the automotive industry, the principle financial drivers are that the car be as expensive to buy as possible, as unreliable and high maintenance as possible, for the customer to keep it for as short a time as possible and that the car have as short a life thereafter. Furthermore, they have no direct interest in fuel consumption or vehicle security. In short, directly the opposite of the interests of the customer.

Hydrogen car builder Hugo Spowers plans to challenge the status quo by replacing outright car ownership with a system similar to a mobile phone contract.

A new way of driving

According to Spowers, speaking in the interview below: “The key aspect of Riversimple is that the company is selling a service rather than a car. Once you are selling a service, you have a direct interest in the car being as cheap as possible, reliable and low-maintenance,because we pay for that, the customer to keep it for long as possible, but no longer than he wants it, because we want it to have as long a life thereafter so we can then lease it into the second hand trade, which is a bigger market than the first-hand market.”

Riversimple is not the first company to offer a hydrogen car, but its approach to car making is radically different to any other manufacturer. Their designs are ‘open source’ which means they are freely available to other car makers who would like to exploit the technology. The designers hope to encourage an environmentally-sustainable alternative to conventional car manufacturing, where cars are bought, driven into the ground and junked

• Riversimple website