rides

The Riversimple Urban Car is an open source hydrogen fuel cell vehicle that will be built by Hugo Spowers’ company, Riversimple. A working demonstrator vehicle was unveiled in London on 06.16.09, and production is planned to begin by 2013.

The Riversimple Urban Car was designed and developed in Great Britain by teams at Cranfield and Oxford Universities. It has been financed by Sebastian Piech, the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche.

The Urban Car is a two passenger vehicle about the size of a Smartcar. It weighs 772 pounds (350 kg), and is constructed of a Carbon fiber composite material body. The car can reach speeds of 50mph and travel for 240 miles (390 km) on 2.2 pounds (1.00 kg) of hydrogen before refueling. It gets the equivalent of 300 mpg in hydrogen. Its life cycle assessment carbon emissions are less then 30g CO2/km. Full scale roll out of the car is expected in the UK in 2013. Riversimple is attempting to raise the funds to build 10 production prototypes for testing.

If you don’t care for the design, feel free to change it on the Hybran wiki. Anyone who wishes to can lease the design for free, tweak it to fit local environments, and manufacture a custom version. If Riversimple likes the tweaks, it will incorporate them into its overall design.