Hydrogen cars have been around for a while so observers could be forgiven for emitting an unexcited “meh” at the unveiling of a new hydrogen powered vehicle in London on 16 June.

What makes this particular car different is that manufacturers Riversimple   plan to make the designs for the car open source and release them on the internet, allowing anyone to manufacture, alter and improve the vehicle from their own designs.
The Riversimple car can reach 50 mph and travel 200 miles per re-fuelling, the equivalent to 300 miles to the gallon. It’s the brainchild of Hugo Spowers a former motorsport engineer and racing driver who got his inspiration from the work of Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institue on lightweight network electric vehicles.
By making the designs both open source and available, Riversimple will invite the community to help develop its vehicles, by licensing its designs to the independent open source foundation 40 Fires.
So how will open source car design work? “The honest answer is that we won’t know until we’ve done it,” says the 40fires website. “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.”
40Fires would like hear from engineers and designers along with anyone who has contributed to large open source software projects and hopes to have the vehicles in production by 2013.