Saturday 4 July 2009

Riversimple Urban Car


is a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle that you can’t buy, but only lease (with fuel). This new lightweight hydrogen-powered car, can travel at 50mph. The two seater Riversimple Urban Car, which weighs just 772lb (350kg), can go 240 miles without re-fueling and could be put into production as soon as 2013. Before that the project leaders plan to raise funds to build ten prototypes in the first year and 50 in the following year.

The company’s idea fosters a desire to encourage open source principles to apply to the manufacture and design of the product.

" The licensing issues are very complex (patent law is not copyright law; cars are not software) and we don’t pretend to have all the answers. It is quite possible that our license may in the end not meet the strict requirements of the Free Software Foundation. But all we really care about is that the license works to ensure that the cars can be built in hundreds of different variations around the world, by local companies and entrepreneurs as well as big multinationals if they like, and that no one company (whether Ford or Riversimple) can dominate the market and keep the ideas to itself."

Go here and you’ll be invited to contribute to make the whole vehicle a better product.
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