Do The Green Thing: Talkin Bout My Hydrogeneration

BHAG, you may remember, is an accronym for Big Hairy Audacious Goal. There should be a picture of Riversimple's Urban Car next to its definition in Wikipedia.

Green Thing was at the launch earlier today at Somerset House in Central London and found it really rather revolutionary (the car that is, not Somerset House or Central London).

1) Firstly there's the ground-breaking technology innovation based on concepts from Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute. You can read the full details on their site but it involves an individual electric motor for each wheel powered by a number of tiny hydrogen fuel cells, no gearbox or transmission, a composite carbon fibre reinforced plastic body instead of steel and regenerative braking.

The end result is a car that does 50 mph and the equivalent of 300 mpg, can travel over 200 miles and emits 30 grams of CO2 per mile (once you take into account all of the energy used to make, service and re-fuel it) which is 1/4 of the most efficient car on the road today.

(The car's long driving range makes solving the problem of hydrogen re-fueling infrastructure more of a possibility, but it's still a killer issue before this can become mass market).

2) Secondly, it's based on an innovative lease vs. buy model. For about £200 a month plus 15p per mile, which gets you the car and all maintenance/repairs plus fuel cells and even breakdown cover, it's certainly affordable. And the anti-obsolescence lease lease approach is a great way to Stick With What You Got if ever we heard one - i.e. you keep the car for as long as possible without upgrading to Next Year's Model.

3) Thirdly, the company structure is radical, more sustainable alternative to the traditional market-based philosophy of creating 'shareholder value' at all costs. It's a negotiated power-sharing system based around four key stakeholders groups: investors, workers, the community and the environment. Each group signs up to the company's values and gets a seat on the board

4) Fourth, the firm's intellectual property will be freely available to all under an open source license. This means that anyone can re-use and build upon the technology as long as they license their new works back to the wider world on the same open terms.

5) Finally, they are aiming to create a network of small, local factories close to demand and local markets - what they call a "distributed, human scale manufacturing' system. Each factory does three things: "building the cars, upgrading them mid-life, and then recovering the materials and parts to use for the next version." Naturally their ultimate ambition is 100% recycling of all materials in each factory.

We blogged before about Willie Smits ingenious and inspiring multi-disciplinary approach to re-growing a rainforest which embraced the complexity of system-wide solution to an environmental problems. Riversimple takes the same holistic view of sustainable transportation and incredibly impressive it is too.

From the drawing board CAD concept...