The race is on to make motoring green

The Times
December 6, 2008
Martin Waller

The last vehicle that Hugo Spowers was publicly associated with was a grand piano on skis that he and a friend tried out on the slopes at St Moritz.
This was as a founder of the Dangerous Sports Club. Today, after 2 serious decades as an automobile engineer and pioneer, Mr Spowers is keen to play down his time at Oxford mixing with like-minded jeunesse dorée who took tea trays down the Cresta Run or dynamited trees in the college quad.
Yet his latest venture might make bungee jumping into water, his own speciality there, look relatively risk-free. He is trying to develop a viable, low-cost, energy-efficient hydrogen fuel cell to replace the internal combustion engine.
“Green” cars, like nuclear fusion that delivers unlimited clean energy, are about ten years or more away - and have been ten years or more away for about the past 50. But Mr Spowers starts with two advantages. He has built one working prototype already, albeit one that did not, by design, make it on to the test track; and he has the financial backing of a scion of the dynasty behind the Porsche marque.
His aim, by the end of the next decade, is a network of almost indestructible, low-polluting cars, taken out under contract like mobile phones, that will refuel on hydrogen at centralised depots. This will break the dominant business model in the industry, whereby cars are bought, driven into the ground and replaced, he believes.
Over the next fortnight, the prototype for the Hyrban, its working title, will be assembled around a one-part body and chassis at a fabrication shop at Silverstone more used to dealing with racing cars. The prototype will hit the road in mid-January.
Mr Spowers opens his laptop to show off the styling. A two-seater, it looks somewhere between a typical inner-city runabout and a 1960s bubble car.
If sufficient funding can be raised, a pilot programme will be operating in a British city by 2013, with about 50 cars and one central refuelling point.
With his floppy hair, cultured tones and woolly jumper, Mr Spowers comes over as a typical member of the privileged upper-middle classes. His father, William Spowers, who came from a monied Melbourne background, ran Christie's rare books department and, as an avid tree collector, assembled Britain's biggest arboretum of rare species at the family home near Bagshot in the Surrey stockbroker belt.
His son was interested in environmental issues from an early age - “I wanted to make wildlife documentaries. By 12 I knew what an ecosystem was.”
Paradoxically, at 15 he discovered motor racing. After reading engineering science at Oriel College, Oxford, he went to work as a mechanic on £2.25 an hour at a Shepherd's Bush automotive engineer. This was assembling a racing car for Le Mans “on a shoestring” while maintaining and repairing other such cars for private clients.
He carried on with various freelance commissions for cars in the Formula Ford 1600 and Formula Ford 2000 categories, then the entry level for professional racing. He raised £13,000 from the sale of a couple of family antiques to build a 1600 himself. Around this time, he ran into Gerald Fitzalan-Howard, part of the Arundel dynasty.
“I had a big room in a squat where I was designing this car on a drawing board,” he recalls. The two decided to set up their own company to make racing cars, one of which he still reckons was the fastest in its category. “We never raced it, so we never found out. We never got the sponsorship together. After two years we parted company. I started doing work restoring old racing cars.”
There were 1930s Maseratis and Alfa Romeos, 1950s Ferraris and any number of D-Type Jaguars. The venture just about survived the collapse of the classic car market in the 1990s.
An admitted purist, Mr Spowers explains that there are two ways of restoring a classic racer. One is to replace whatever is necessary to bring it back to mint condition, what he calls “chocolate box restoration”. This always sells best. The second is to restore it so it looks like what it is, a superlative car with a history.
“You might be throwing away a 40-year-old chassis in which Stirling Moss has sat and sweated,” he says emphatically. “If it was the car in which Duncan Hamilton won Le Mans in 1953, you don't want it to look like it was built yesterday.”
His enthusiasm for motor racing was waning, increasingly at odds with his environmentalism, and he sold Prowess Racing. “I really didn't know what I was going to do, but it wasn't going to be anything to do with cars.”
He was wrong. In 1998 he embarked on a two-year MBA at Cranfield University. His dissertation was “a feasibility study on bringing composite-bodied hydrogen fuel cell cars to market”.
By this time, he had fallen under the spell of various fringe science thinkers. They included Fritjof Capra, who tried to establish links between nuclear physics and oriental religion; Karl-Henrick Robert, a Swedish oncologist and early proponent of sustainability; and the American energy experts Amory Lovin and Paul Hawken.
Mr Spowers describes a hybrid fuel car such as the Toyota Prius as “a Siamese twin, not a hybrid”, relying on two types of motor under one bonnet. He was determined to develop a true “network hybrid”.
A little science is in order here. The average car, by using energy to accelerate and then throwing it away by braking, is inefficient. It might have a 150bhp engine for acceleration but cruise using only 25bhp of this.
Mr Spowers wanted a car that could cruise using about half its available power. One way is so-called “regenerative braking”, whereby the kinetic energy lost in deceleration is pumped back into the fuel cell for re-use. This is used in hybrid vehicles such as the Prius.
“By the time I was at Cranfield, I was pretty clear that the big barriers weren't technical, they were commercial. They were to do with the inertia in our systems - people, politics, business.”
The first project, the LIFECar, was undertaken by his own company RiverSimple, Cranfield, Morgan Cars - which built it - BOC, QinetiQ, the high-tech defence business, and Oxford University. “We haven't driven it around. It's a laboratory research project. The fuel cell was tested independently of the rest of the power train.” The project cost £1.9 million, half-prised with some difficulty from what was then the DTI. The model still exists in two pieces at Cranfield and Morgan.
So far, £3million has been committed to the Hyrban, most of it from the family of Sebastian Piech, who control the distribution of Porsches but are no longer involved in manufacture. “This is very much an investment we made as a family,” Mr Piech says. “The family agreed that long-term there needs to be a new model for providing personal mobility.”
Mr Piech is involved in various high-tech ventures in China, including a Shanghai company making hydrogen fuel cells that are being used, scaled up, in the Hyrban. The first models will have a range of about 200 miles on a kilo of hydrogen. The next vehicles will increase this to 400 miles.
At the heart of the project is the idea of “sale of service”, whereby you buy use of the vehicle rather than its ownership and the asset remains on the providers' balance sheet. This gets around the “buy and throw away” model that Mr Spowers believes is outdated.
He admits that the venture faces a number of hurdles, not least finding the funding to build the network of cars and refuelling points to the point that it is sustainable. No venture capital firm would consider such a long-term project.
He needs a Bill Gates prepared to fund such a step for posterity. Most such are already talking, one suspects, to Hyrban's American equivalents. So what chances does he give the project? “I'm an optimist. A 90 per cent chance. We would be absolutely asinine not to develop this.”
The road so far
Born: January 23, 1960
Education: Oriel College, Oxford, MA in engineering science
Career: 1982-84 ADA Engineering, mechanic; 1984-96 Prowess Racing; 1998-99 Executive MBA, Cranfield University; 2001 founds RiverSimple; 2003-08 LIFECar project; expected 2009 launch of Hyrban