The open source road to 100 MPG
by Ruth Suehle
The Society for Sustainable Mobility, formerly known as the Open Source Green Vehicle project, is one of the official teams registered for the Automotive X-Prize competition.
The X-Prize Foundation got a lot of press in 2004 when it awarded $10 million to the first private team that built and launched a vehicle carrying three people 100 km above the earth. This year, the foundation has been working to get the funding for the Automotive X-Prize: another $10 million to the team that can build a marketable 100 MPG vehicle. Will open source win the prize?
The Society for Sustainable Mobility (SSM) plans to enter their Kernel hybrid vehicle, which is already a year into development.
They borrowed the Kernel name from the software world. “Kernel™ is our common electrical architecture and it is shared amongst all vehicles in the same product line,” explains the OSGV blog.
Kernel™ defines certain characteristics that enable a VERY KEY piece of technology for the alternative fuel market, and that is the liberty for the fleet to adapt to ANY fuel sources: gasoline, diesel, biodiesel, hydrogen fuel cell, ethanol, natural gas – you name it, as long as the OEM is able to find a suitable electric generator conforming to the Kernel™ specification.
SSM’s technical data, including designs and documentation, will be released under a license similar to the GPL called the SSM-OSGV Open Design Agreement. The license allows you to view, adapt, modify, and redistribute, as long as the same license is applied and the new data is made available through osgv.org. However, you may not produce actual products using the data. SSM is working on a Production License for that purpose. The production license will require end products to comply with SSM’s standards, including weight and emissions.
August 31st, 2007 at 8:22 am
It’s cool that it’s “Open Source” but the premise that a marketable (hence mass production) 100 mpg vehicle is “green” is highly questionable. This seems like mere greenwashing of a fundamentally non-sustainable way of living which involves commuting stupidly long distances.