In a small workshop called Riversimple in central Wales, Hugo Spowworth spent 20 years working on his hydrogen-powered Rasa and convincing investors to support his idea. He said Rasa's lightweight design concept came from the famous Lotus car.
The Rasa is a hand-built two-seat coupe model with gull-wing doors. It uses an 8.5 kW fuel cell (about 11bhp), provides power to 4 in-wheel motors, is all-wheel drive, has a maximum output of 600 Nm of torque, has an endurance of 483 km, and consumes 1.5 kg of hydrogen. With kinetic energy recovery ability, it can recover 70% of the energy during the emergency braking and 50% of the energy when the ordinary brake. The entire drivetrain has only 18 moving parts, accelerates in less than 10 seconds from 0-60mph, and is limited to a top speed of 97 kilometers per hour. The vehicle has only two gears, forward and reverse.
Thanks to the carbon composite monolithic body and aluminum subframe, the car weighs only 580 kg. The body weighs only 39 kg, the doors weigh 8 kg, the battery weighs 19 kg, and the carbon fiber reinforced plastic and glass fiber reinforced polymer body panels make the roof weight very light. Rasa's average CO2 emissions from production to end-of-life are about 40 g/km, which is expected to be even lower as the drivetrain and production processes improve.
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