Riversimple Rasa car exhausts only water
The Riversimple Rasa is a very special car. Not only is it zero-emission, but it only has 18 moving parts.
Riversimple is the British startup behind the Rasa which has just been unveiled as a working prototype.
The super-simple Riversimple Rasa design only has 18 moving parts, weighs just 90lbs and can run for 300 miles on 85 ounces of hydrogen.
This petrol-pump dodger works by passing hydrogen through a small 8.5 kilowatt fuel cell, that combines with oxygen to form water and electricity, which then drives four motors inside the vehicle.
Even stopping adds to the mix as more than half of the the energy produced when braking is recovered by super-capacitors. This is then turned into electricity to boost acceleration.
The Rasa is about to start testing in Europe and a public beta with 20 customers is slated for later this year, with plans to get to market in 2018.
The Riversimple Rasa is currently best suited for inner-city use as it has a top speed of just 60mph at the moment. So, yeah, the Tesla might win in a drag race but the Rasa’s range exceeds even Elon Musk’s electric cars – and this is just the prototype!
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This all sounds perfect but refueling hydrogen cells is going to be even trickier than finding LPG or electric car charging points.
But with big names like Toyota, Nissan and Honda exploring this kind of fuel technology already, with plans to collaborate on gas stations, this tiny Welsh wonder might yet be an early leader in the latest gen green machines.
