The California Energy Commission awarded a $684,421 grant to StratosFuel, Inc. under GFO-16-605 to deploy a fleet of hydrogen electric vehicles that can be rented by the hour or day through a smartphone app. The vehicles were to be deployed in disadvantage communities within Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. These areas were chosen for initial vehicle deployment because they had high levels of pollution, and Cal Enviro ratings of over 90. Moreover, these communities did not have zero-emission or on-demand transportation services available.
Overall, the project deployed 15 vehicles at six locations throughout the Cities of San Bernardino and Riverside. The parking locations were carefully selected based on accessibility, visibility, and density. The parking locations were at downtown districts, universities, hotels, municipal airports, and transit hubs. Each parking location was retrofitted with signage, and visible through the StratosShare app.
Based on this, StratosFuel was able to successfully implement an on-demand hydrogen carshare program. The system functions by users downloading the StratosShare app to reserve, unlock, and start a vehicle from their phone. To implement such a service, each vehicle was equipped with special hardware that allowed communications with StratosFuel servers to authenticate user reservations. To advertise the program to members of the community, StratosFuel distributed marketing material throughout the Cities.
