Riversimple's Purpose
To pursue, systematically, the elimination of the environmental impact of personal transport.
Everything we do – the design of the car, the structure of the business, the people we work with – is in pursuit of this goal. A “Whole System Design” approach ensures that every step we take, every investment we make, gets us closer to our end goal.
We don’t believe that there needs to be any trade-off between a successful, profitable, resilient business and delivering our aim of eliminating environmental impact. The more environmental damage we eliminate, the more successful we will be as a business. The secret lies in aligning the interests of all key stakeholders and focusing on delivering outcomes that benefit all.
Circular Economy
Aimed at eliminating waste, Riversimple follows a circular model whereby vehicles are provided as a service as opposed to sold. This means that Riversimple is responsible for the life-span of the vehicles so, in contrast to some traditional product-sale business models, the vehicles are designed from the very beginning to last as long as possible and be as robust as possible – for Riversimple, spending more on higher quality components in the build may save operating costs over the lifetime of the vehicle.
It also means that we can amortise the higher costs of building a truly efficient car over a long time and make them affordable from the very beginning. Our business model ensures that circularity is at the heart of our operations and at a vehicle’s end-of-life we intend to recover as many components as possible, keeping vital materials and resources in circulation. As well as being better for the planet, sustainable mobility makes excellent economic sense for us.
We are working with our suppliers to explore how this model can be adopted upstream along our supply chain so that the suppliers’ interests align with our ambition to create long-lasting, high-quality vehicles with minimal waste.
Click here to find out more about Circular Revolution, a £2.3m project part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund through the Welsh Government.
Distributed Manufacturing
All our vehicles are currently built in our research and development facility in Mid Wales. For volume production, we don’t need massive factories to achieve our goals. We are working on building multiple small plants to be located near the markets they serve.
Future Guardian Governance
Riversimple’s corporate structure is being designed so that all our stakeholders – customers, investors, the environment, the community, the staff and our commercial partners – really do have a stake. The board’s duty is to balance and protect the benefits it delivers to six critical stakeholder groups – environment, users, neighbours, staff, investors and commercial partners. The company is answerable to six Custodians who represent the stakeholders groups and who hold the voting shares.
For more information see here.
