It isn't everyday that you find a car with the potential to change the way we think about automobile design, but the Riversimple Urban vehicle is already challenging contemporary paradigms in car manufacturing with its combination of a future fuelling system and its unique approach to open source building.
The car is first and foremost hydrogen based, meaning it won't give off any of those nasty petrol emissions associated with most cars. It's a neat low carbon alternative. It's currently one of the cleanest fuels avaliable.
The smartcar sized Riversimple has some nice tech under the hood too: a 50mph top speed, 0-30mph acceleration in 5.5 seconds, and a 240 mile range. Not bad for an alternative fuel. The car uses a small 6Kw fuel cell, which supposably cuts down on the fuel emissions that a typical Toyota Prius would produce, by one third.
But if that isn't enough to have car lovers grabbing at the steering wheel for a test drive, there is something more and it lies at the heart of the tech industry. It is of course, open source.
The way we approach open source in software and in our computers could change the way we build cars.Instead of being confined to a pre-fabricated factory tooling kit, the open-source Riversimple car could offer enterprising home developers the chance to make mistakes and improve on those mistakes, leading to better engineering and design.
However, the Riversimple isn't the first car to proclaim its role in the open-source car movement. The oScar open source vehicle was first envisioned by British engineer Hugo Spowers, when he tried to find a better way to produce a functional people mover that would give the web community a chance to interact in the CAD design of the car.
Likewise, 'c,mm,n' (or common) was a Dutch university research project designed to create a suitable open source car that would abide by the principles of open source.
The car is still a long way off for now. Avaliable for a twenty year lease, Riverside, the brains behind the Riversimple predicts the first cars to be ready within 10 years, although prototypes are already showing promise.
If open source is the key to better technologies in the web arena, then there's no reason why an open source car can't also be a pioneer in the way vehicles are created and designed. Still, open source cars have a long way to go beyond they unseat the likes of the Toyota. But as a developer project, they're already giving car enthusiasts and budding engineer's ample room to dream about the future.
Issue: 303 | May
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