Riversimple leads £1.7m project to build a 400-mile hydrogen car
Riversimple leads ZELLOR project to develop a lightweight hydrogen car with 400-mile range, backed by £1.7m from the UK Government's DRIVE35 programme.
Welsh hydrogen car maker Riversimple has won government funding to develop a lightweight fuel cell vehicle with a claimed 400-mile range.
The ZELLOR project - Zero Emission Lightweight Long Range - has a total budget of £1.7 million, part-funded through the UK Government's £4 billion DRIVE35 programme, delivered by the Advanced Propulsion Centre in partnership with Innovate UK. It was one of 18 demonstrator projects announced on 9 April as part of a wider £470 million funding package, the bulk of which went to Agratas for battery gigafactory investment.
Riversimple says the project will demonstrate a vehicle combining zero emissions, long range and light weight - a combination it argues no current ZEV manufacturer has achieved. The company's existing Rasa prototype weighs 580kg and manages a claimed 300 miles on 1.5kg of hydrogen using an 8.5kW fuel cell and supercapacitors.
The targets align with a supercar Riversimple announced in August 2024, which the company said would weigh just 620kg and deliver a 410-mile range. That project framed lightweight construction as the missing piece of a "trilemma" facing the automotive industry - zero emissions, long range and light weight.
The consortium includes GreenFlux Motors of Colchester, working on electric motors; TTPi of Nottingham, a University spin-out specialising in power electronics; and Pi Engineering Consultancy, contributing a machine-learning development tool called Pi-Hive. Work is based at Riversimple's facility in Powys, where the first project meeting took place in February.
"Weight is the feature that is yet to be resolved in the market, and correlates with all the negative impacts of cars - resource consumption, embedded carbon in manufacturing, energy consumption in use, road safety, air and water quality," said founder Hugo Spowers.
