Is this the car that can save the world?

A corporate lawyer, he travelled the world working on international deals worth up to £800m for large companies. Then something changed. He left his job, turning his back on the corporate world and the high wages it brought him, and went in search of something else.

“I was quite a corporate person until my environmentalism became more important than making lots of money,” says the father-of-one, who lives in Brockenhurst.

“The big change came seven years ago. It had been brewing for a while.

I’d been reading about how big companies were ruining the world, and I was working for one. I wanted to find a way to best use my skills to help the world, rather than just helping big companies to get bigger. I wanted to change corporations – they’re structured to serve shareholders and money, not people and the planet.”

Luckily Patrick met Hugo Spowers, who shared his vision and wanted to transform the car industry. The pair started working together and Riversimple was born.

On Tuesday they unveil “the future of personal transport” – a hydrogenpowered car.

This lightweight two-seater car achieves performance figures never before attained from hydrogen fuel cell technology.

It also challenges some of the most fundamental conventions on which the last century’s car industry was founded – and has come unstuck.

What’s more, it is set to be available in four years’ time – much sooner than the ten to 15 years that is generally considered to be the soonest a hydrogen car could be expected to hit the streets.

Patrick explains: “Most of the industry recognise that hydrogen fuel cells are the future because they’re twice as efficient as the internal combustion engine. The problem is that, because car companies are only thinking of their own survival, they’re trying to take existing cars and modify them to suit fuel cells. That’s stupid because fuel cells aren’t very power-dense – you need a lot of them to get the same amount of power – so we take a different approach and say ‘let’s start with the fuel cell and build the car around it’.”

The result is an ultra-lightweight car, made out of carbon composites, the material used to make yachts, without a heavy gearbox or transmission system.

The car tips the scales at just 350kg as opposed to the one or more tonnes that many cars on our streets today weigh.

As well as the fuel cell the car also runs on an ultracapacitor battery, which collects around 50 per cent of the energy used when the car brakes and uses that to boost power when accelerating.

As a result the car needs a much smaller, and significantly less expensive, fuel cell that is conventionally thought to be necessary for a hydrogen car.

To power a conventional car, a fuel cell of around 85kw is needed, costing anywhere between £600,0000 and £1m.

The fuel cell in the Riversimple Urban Car is just 6kw and costs a far more affordable £2,000.

The plan is to be testing the car on a track within a year and in two years’ time to roll out a fleet of 50 cars to be tested in a small city, such as Southampton or Oxford. They are then set to go into production in 2013.

Patrick explains that they have started with a city car for practical reasons – in order to power a car which runs on hydrogen you do, of course, need hydrogen refuelling stations.

Therefore it makes more sense to begin with city cars, installing a refuelling station in each city as they go, rather than attempting to roll out cars for travelling longer distances and having to install hydrogen refuelling stations across the country.

The car has a top speed of 50mph – which Patrick says is plenty for a city car – and can do 200 miles at a time. The plan is to develop a family car with a top speed of around 80mph in the future.

The cars will be leased rather than sold, encouraging manufacturers to focus on the best use of resources and the longevity of their vehicles rather than having to rely on selling more and more cars in order to maintain profit.

It will cost around £200 a month plus 15p per mile to lease a car, which, Patrick argues, is competitive given that it includes all maintenance.

Having a more people and environmentally friendly long-term business structure is as important to Riversimple as producing an environmentally friendly car.

“We’ve structured the company so it’s not dominated by shareholders,” says Patrick.

“It’s really important to us that we don’t sell out – we don’t want to be taken over by a corporate interest. I’d I make no money out of this but it works it will be a success. If it makes lots of money but it doesn’t work, it’s a failure. The planet needs these ideas.”

Rather than patenting their car design and attempting to compete with the big car manufacturers which, as Patrick says, would be “crazy” they are releasing it under Open Source on the Internet.

This means that other people can buy the licence to use their design and build a car but they are not allowed to patent it and have to share any improvements they make.

“We think that the planet needs more efficient vehicles and the best way is to collaborate across the world. We think this is the right thing to do but we also think it’s a good business strategy, as we’re a small company.

“We want people round the world building these cars and sharing their ideas with us.

We’ll have a lot of competitors which is scary but also healthy. Because we only need small factories for these cars, our vision is that in a few years we’ll have factories in Southampton, Bournemouth, round the world with around 150 people in them specifically making local cars for local needs.”

Patrick’s biggest hope for Tuesday’s launch is that it will change how people think about hydrogen cars.

“We’re a tiny company with a tiny budget but we’ve proved what’s possible,” he says.

“The Obama administration has reduced the funding for hydrogen vehicles because they said it’s too long to wait, but we say that’s nonsense. If we are four years away from production why can’t someone else be?

We think everyone should be building these.”

At a glance: The Riversimple Urban Car

■ Runs on hydrogen

■ Has ultracapacitor battery which collects 50 per cent of energy used when braking

■ There is no gearbox – instead an electric motor is attached to each wheel, doubling as brakes and generating electricity

■ Lightweight composite body – weighs 350kg

■ 60kw fuel cell which costs around £2,000

■ Can travel 200 miles between refuelling

■ Top speed 50mph

■ Will be leased not sold at around £200 month plus 15p per mile. At the end of its life the car parts will be reused

■ The Riversimple strategy integrates the development of the cars with the development of a refuelling infrastructure

■ The car is set to go into production in 2013