Yesterday I pondered a pairing between the Horizon HydroFill home hydrogen refueling products and the Riversimple fuel cell vehicle. In June 2009 I had talked about how the Riversimple, which by the way carries a Horizon 6 kw fuel cell, is an open source vehicle that many are able to develop simultaneously, which will speed this product to market.
Now, it has been announced that the Riversimple Hyrban FCV plans are being published, “All of the designs for Riversimple’s Hyrban will be published on the web, starting with the car’s rear suspension layout. The idea is to speed up development by gathering criticism and comment from users, which will also help to cut the costs of the technology.”
Riversimple has licensed the open source technology to 40fires.org and the rear suspension plans can be found at the link provided. There are wikis, forums, galleries, news and blogs plus a description of the projects.
One exciting aspect about the Riversimple Hyrban is that this is a community project and not just an internal proprietary creation by one of the big automakers. Community input is vital to the success or failure of the Hyrban.
In addition, the building of the Hyrban will be extremely flexible in that it will most likely be built in small numbers between 5,000 and 10,000 and can be built in many different countries taking regional differences in tastes plus functionality into account.