Clean transportation visionary and Sunline CEO Richard Cromwell (center left) describes the operation of the sun-focusing photovoltaic collectors being installed high above the Sunline Transit Agency.

The idea is compelling. Solar power or other carbon free renewable energy sources would be used to generate electricity. This is used to generate hydrogen from water, which in turn is used to power cars. The potential benefits are enormous - no exhaust fumes and no greenhouse gases coming from car exhausts. Some companies are taking this technology very seriously. -- BBC (UK)  September 26, 2000

The solar electricity will be fed to the Stuart Energy Systems fleet fueling appliance to produce pure hydrogen to power Sunline's XCELLSiS hydrogen bus.

The Stuart Energy Systems PIII Electrolyser overlooks the new photovoltaic array that will feed it power.

The newly-installed Phoenix Gas Systems natural gas reformer from
Hydrogen Burner Technology provides the world's foremost public demonstration of a future hydrogen generation station for vehicle refueling.

(Courtesy of Hydrogen Burner Technology)

The heart of Hydrogen Burner's partial oxidation hydrogen generation technology - the Under-Oxidized Burner (UOB).

Sunline Transit's XCELLSiS hydrogen powered bus is undergoing an extensive testing program in the Palm Springs environment before embarking on revenue runs.  This latest bus in the XCELLSiS prototype series is more powerful and easier to maintain than the previous Ballard buses that operated successfully on revenue runs in Chicago and Vancouver.

A powerful electric motor nestles between two huge PEM fuel cell stacks.  The number of tubes has been significantly reduced from the previous series Ballard bus.  The entire fuel cell/electric drive module is being optimized to fit into existing diesel bus motor cavities for the wholesale repowering of municipal bus fleets.

Sunline built the hydrogen bus service building for less than one hundred thousand U.S. dollars.  The structural frame is covered with cloth.   A vent runs along the length of the roof, making it impossible for any escaping hydrogen to be trapped.  The local code recognizes the building as essentially an "outside area."

Jim Heffel, University of California, Riverside, unveils
hydrogen-powered Shelby Cobra at HTAP.  Heffel believes the Cobra, donated by racing legend Carroll Shelby, will easily break the speed record for hydrogen powered vehicles at Bonneville.
-- Contact Heffel to sponsor your logo on the car --

Hydrogen Cobra Video     -- Get Quicktime --

THE ICHC SHORT LIST

1) The Riversimple Open Source Car Design

Are Our Designs Free?
Patrick's blog    40 Fires Foundation    June 19, 2009

How does open source car design work?
    The honest answer is that we won't know until we have done it. But we have plenty of ideas, which will develop over the coming months as we share the designs for the Riversimple technology demonstrator and start to produce collaboratively a production prototype.
    There are lots of inspiring examples from open source software, and we are being advised by people with experience in this area. But there are many differences between open source hardware and software design.

Differences between open source hardware and software
    There are some major differences between open source software and hardware design:

- There is a "gap" between the on-line design work and the finished product delivered to the consumer. Not only is there substantial physical testing to be done, but also there is significant work to be done to turn the designs into an actual functioning product (we like the analogy of a food recipe – a recipe is not a meal, you need a chef to turn it into a meal). The answer we believe lies in establishing the right relationship between 40 Fires and the manufacturers (the first of which is Riversimple), where each party has its needs met.

- There’s a technical challenge to share ideas on-line, where there is no satisfactory open source CAD (Computer-Aided Design) application. Our solution is to use a low tech approach at first, using a wiki-based website and freely available 3-D viewers to show the 3-D drawings. In time we may get involved in developing a OS CAD program.

- Licensing. We cannot simply take the standard OS software license (the GPL is the most common), since we are dealing with hardware, which is not so well protected by copyright. See further down for some thoughts on the licensing issues.

We'd like to hear from you!
    As in Open Source software projects, we are not attempting to do everything at once and we don’t have to. The designs that Riversimple is licensing to 40 Fires resemble in many ways the code base which a complex software project starts with.
    However, because a car is different to software and requires different development stages and processes, we will be asking for input into specific areas, as well as procedural matters.
    That's why we would like to hear from you, not only from engineers or designers, but also if you have contributed to large scale open source software projects and can help set up our project management structure. Lawyers with an understanding of copyright and patents would also be useful as we review the most appropriate license to use and if and how we should be using patents for some new inventions which emerge.
    To get involved, send an e-mail to participate@40fires.org explaining your interest and skills.

The stages
    We envisage different stages:

Stage 1  Over the coming months, starting this month (July 2009), we will make available design schematics from the Riversimple technology demonstrator vehicle, together with a description of each component's function in the whole system, and a vehicle design brief for the production prototype. We will provide a mailing list or discussion forum to enable comments and discussions. At this stage we expect Riversimple, as the creator of the original designs, to be leading the discussions.

Stage 2  As the detailed discussions develop, we expect a broad consensus to emerge amongst the participants as to which is the best solution to pursue for each design . By this stage, we expect the conversations to be more democratic, with a broad cross-section of collaborators participate, sharing their knowledge and insights.

Stage 3  We start creating detailed designs collaboratively and publishing them on-line. Eventually an entire vehicle will be created, and tested, on-line. We are aiming to complete the design of the production prototype by the summer of 2010.

Stage 4  Riversimple and other entrepreneurs, under license from 40 Fires, can start downloading the schematics and building and testing the vehicles. With the lessons from this, work can start on an improved production prototype.

Are our designs free (as in beer)?
    Richard Stallman famously said that free software is "free as in speech not free as in beer."

Are our designs free?
    We consider that the designs themselves will be free in the sense of free speech, with one exception. Currently we have chosen a Creative Commons, non-commercial license. So the designs can be used, modified, distributed under the same license terms but not for commercial purposes.
    We have chosen to be conservative at this stage and not allowed commercial use. This may change - we intend to set up a discussion group to debate this. The issue is that we don't want a large, profit-focused organisation taking the designs and starting manufacturing with them yet. We intend that when we grant a manufacturing license, this will be for a small fee (say $10 per car) to cover 40 Fires running costs.
    We are also keen on collaborating so if a commercial organisation wants to use the designs, we'd like to chat with them first before allowing them to use the designs for commercial purposes.
    The licensing issues are very complex (patent law is not copyright law; cars are not software) and we don't pretend to have all the answers. It is quite possible that our license may in the end not meet the strict requirements of the Free Software Foundation. But all we really care about is that the license works to ensure that the cars can be built in hundreds of different variations around the world, by local companies and entrepreneurs as well as big multinationals if they like, and that no one company (whether Ford or Riversimple) can dominate the market and keep the ideas to itself.