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Open your mind, open your source
How do you ensure the hydrogen car you've spent ten years working on uses the best technology and ideas from all around the world? Easy – simply invite the whole world to check out your designs and make their own suggestions and improvements.
Hugo Spowers
Engineer Hugo Spowers, founder of UK-based Riversimple, took the innovative ‘open source’ approach to design his hydrogen-powered urban car.
Meritocracy
What is open source car design? It’s inspired by software designers like Linux, Apache, and Mozilla who offer access to a software’s source code and allow peers to modify it, fix any bugs and redesign it to their own ends, unlike behemoths like Microsoft who keep their source code a closely-guarded secret.
“One of the virtues of open source is it sorts the wheat from the chaff. It quickly weeds out the most successful approaches because when everything’s free, there’s no room for a cheap, inferior version. The projects are true meritocracies,” says Hugo.
Pull the curtain
Hugo has developed the Riversimple Urban Car in conjunction with Oxford University and Cranfield University. It has a range in excess of two hundred miles, can reach fifty miles per hour and emits around 31 grammes of CO2 per kilometre.
The car was unveiled at the Green Motor Expo in the UK in September 2009, but Hugo says there’s a lot of design work to be done before production starts in 2013.
He says around four hundred people are registered with the project, boasting an impressive array of skills and experience – from power electronics to composite design – and first on the agenda for these people is the vehicle’s rear suspension design.
“The car we unveiled was designed to be a one-off. It’s not suitable for mass production, so we need to make changes,” he says.
Common knowledge
Hugo has studied open source projects around the world and has invited a representative from Dutch open source community
C,mm,n (pronounced ‘common’) to a conference he’s organising.
The love child of four hundred people.
“They’re keen for us to learn from their mistakes and we want as much collaboration between projects as possible,” says Hugo.
He believes open source isn’t perfect, and there’s need for some direction, possibly in the form of an international open source forum. Hugo also believes opens source projects can be affected by funding, so when it dries up, the projects stall. However, his project is different.
Come what may
“We’re totally committed to open source. We’ve actually built a car, and we’re going to build a production car, come what may,” he enthuses.
He’s got some influential backers too, most notably the immediate family of Ernst Piëch of the Porsche dynasty.
Roll-out
Another of Riversimple’s innovative ideas is how the car will be rolled out. They’ll not be sold; they’ll be leased as a fully bundled service that includes maintenance, support and fuel.
It will commence with an initial pilot of fifty vehicles in a small UK city, which will then be used as a blueprint for a city-by-city roll-out. (Look out for our forthcoming feature on Hugo’s novel plans for this.)
Mockery
Even with his optimism, enthusiasm and determination, however, Hugo says he’s fully aware that life frequently makes a mockery of even the most painstakingly prepared projects. After all, his favourite joke, he says, is: “How do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans.”
Here’s hoping the joke isn’t on him.
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