Riversimple designs a new open source car and a new car company
Riversimple is a unique company. Yes, it designs cars but the car designs are open source, meaning anyone can look at the plans and propose modifications. The company is more interested in creating cars that improve the environment than it is in making a profit and the company intends to lease the cars for 20 years rather than sell them.
If Riversimple hasn’t peaked your curiosity than you haven’t grasped just how revolutionary the company is. This company is not only planning on making the cars, but leasing them very long term with all fuel included in the lease. The fuel, by the way, is a fuel cell that will use hydrogen. Since the company will own the cars and will be providing the fuel, it expects its cars to be well built, require little maintenance and sip fuel.
The Hyrban is a unique approach to car design on several fronts but the most amazing aspect is that the company plans on leaving the car designs as open source posted on 40Fire Foundation. As of yet, Riversimple (the creators of 40Fire Foundation) have not decided what types of Open Source license to use, whether anything will be patented, or exactly how the whole idea is going to work.
The company chose open source for two reasons: The company founders consider it the right thing to do and they consider it to be a sound business strategy. They readily acknowledge that by taking this approach they will be creating competitors. Creating competition is seen as healthy.
The car itself will be an extremely lightweight two-seater urban vehicle powered by hydrogen fuel cells. The car won’t have batteries but will have ultra capacitors. Like several other planned electric vehicles, the Hyrban will have a motor on each wheel and “network electric”.
What is “network electric” ? That means that unlike most cars where power moves essentially in one direction, the electricity in this car will be able to flow in multiple directions as needed. For example,”from the fuel cell to the motors or to the ultracapacitors, from the motors to and from the ultracapacitors, and so on.”
The car will be built of lightweight composites since there is no need to incorporate anything stronger to house heavy batteries or a combustion engine. Because it will be so light, power steering and braking won’t be necessary jettisoning any need for such systems and associated parts. The car will also have two other unique features, “1) decoupling acceleration and cruise demands and 2) mass decompounding.”
Decoupling acceleration and cruise demands means that rather than equipping the car with 100 kW fuel cell like the Honda FCX Clarity, this car will use only a 6 kW fuel cell. Unlike the Honda, the Hyrban will be much lighter needing less power for cruising or accelerating. The other reason why a 6kW fuel cell will do is because the fuel cell is only needed to provide energy for cruising “which is usually only about 20 percent of the maximum power required when accelerating.” The extra 80 percent needed during acceleration will come from the ultracapacitors which will store energy from regenerative braking.
Mass decompounding is rather more complicated. Simply put, the more you design the car as a whole, the more you can leave out obsolete parts and systems. The less you need, the lighter the car, and the more you plan the whole car instead of just one system, the more efficient the entire vehicle will be.
Tuesday, June 16, Riversimple will be unveiling its first fuel cell electric urban vehicle. Ultimately Riversimple wants to build 10 prototypes based on the input of not just engineers and designers, but regular consumers as well.
Tune in June 16 when the first Riversimple car will be reviewed.
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June 13th, 2009
Cute idea, but I worry when I read this “than it is in making a profit”. That’s the problem with a lot of green initiatives, they don’t deliever RoI, which is why they fall over.