Students at Cicero-North Syracuse High School are demonstrating an innovation in flexible vehicle design with the hydrogen vehicles they built for Shell Eco-marathon Americas 2013. The CNS Performance Engineering Team fashioned its hydrogen tank and fuel cell unit, shown in one of the photos above, as a modular, removable unit that can be moved back and forth between the two cars it designed: one, a teardrop-shaped prototype vehicle and the other, a street-legal urban concept car.

The team’s coach, Marty Miner, who teaches pre-engineering technology at the New York school, explains that it is very much like the “skateboard” chassis concept that was developed by General Motors when it rolled out hydrogen fuel cell concept cars in the past decade. In