The system redesign needed for cars of the future: Hugo Spowers at TEDxUHowest
Channel: TEDx Talks
Date: 2013-06-19

Who is Hugo Spowers?

Hugo Spowers is the founder of Riversimple LLP, a company committed to developing sustainable vehicles and the strategies necessary for bringing them to market.

Hugo studied engineering at Oxford University in preparation for a career in motorsport. He set up Prowess Racing and spent 15 years designing, building, driving and restoring racing cars, an industry in which projects develop fast and success comes through systems integration rather than development of new technologies.

He left the racing industry due to concerns about its environmental impacts and went on to obtain an MBA from Cranfield University. At Cranfield, in 1999, he conducted a feasibility study into bringing hydrogen fuel cell cars to market. He concluded that a step change in both technology and business model is both essential and possible and, furthermore, that the principal barriers are not technical but to do with inertia.  At this time he developed the concepts on which Riversimple is founded.

In 2002, he built a consortium for the Morgan LIFECar (Lightweight Integrated Fuel Efficient Car), a research project to demonstrate that a fundamentally different vehicle architecture is technically possible and can deliver improvement in fuel consumption by factors rather than fractions. After 3 years, he finally gained grant support from the UK government and the car was shown at Geneva in 2008. This led to the founding of Riversimple with Sebastian Piech of the Porsche family. Chris Reitz, formerly of Alfa Romeo, has joined the team and is styling the new production vehicle that they are developing for local use from their current technology demonstrator.
 
What is this talk all about?

"You can't cross a chasm in two leaps": the system redesign needed for cars of the future

No technology can compete with the potential efficiency of a Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicle for the range to which we have become accustomed; the principal barriers are not technical but have to do with people, politics and business inertia and step changes are needed in both technology and business model.

Popular wisdom suggests that such an approach is impractical; the 'prudent' strategy is to make only one change at a time, but this 'prudence' creates artificial barriers in the face of a step change. There is no product on the planet that is remotely as good value for money as the modern motor car -- but it is unfit for purpose in the 21st century. Redesigning both the fundamental architecture of cars and the business model for providing mobility reduces barriers and risks, both technical and commercial.

This can be illustrated by three major barriers to a sustainable industrial model for hydrogen cars, and the inter-related strategies that Riversimple has designed to address them. These barriers are in resource efficiency, refuelling infrastructure and governance. Addressing these issues simultaneously is possible; it is not a zero-sum game and Whole System Design can yield solutions that are complementary and mutually reinforcing.

About TED and TEDx

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