Canada and the United States live within a culture that dotes on the raw speed and brute power that come from the internal combustion engine. It's a culture that uses fossil fuels like bodybuilders use steroids.

Should you doubt this, all that's necessary for confirmation is to sit through an evening of television, and watch the ads for cars, SUVs, and trucks that tear up the landscape, scream across salt flats, and perform feats of Xtreme Power.

To Jeff Fisher and William Scully, as odd a couple bound by friendship as you're likely to find, this culture is a legacy of the past — outdated, environmentally destructive and, they say, about to be outstripped by technologies where fuel will become as obsolete as the paddlewheel steamer.

As with all visionaries, they are out to change the world. They want to replace cars with vehicles that require no fuel, produce no noise and, except for wheels, create no friction, and have no moving parts — meaning no pistons, no gears, no transmission, no drive shaft, no flywheel, no clutch and, as a consequence, much reduced weight.

On a factory floor in east-end Montreal, they've built prototypes to demonstrate that their ideas will work. There are about a dozen among the clutter of work tables, wires, soldering and welding tools, old bicycle parts, pieces of pipe, nuts and bolts.

The vehicles look boxy and rudimentary, like golf carts designed from a Mechano set. But they work, as Fisher and Scully demonstrated in a lane behind the factory.

Conventional terminology would refer to them as solar vehicles. Fisher and Scully call them fuelless vehicles to mark them as different from other so-called vehicles for the future.

Hydrogen burning cars, for instance, need hydrogen as a fuel, as do vehicles powered by hydrogen fuel cells. It requires a lot of electricity to derive hydrogen from water, so really, the fuel for these kinds of vehicles is electricity from generating plants.  Electric cars run on electricity, and make similar demands on generating plants. Hybrid cars, burn gasoline or ethanol.

The Fisher-Scully prototypes develop electricity from solar cells mounted on a Plexiglas roof, and on a Plexiglas windshield at the front.

What's unique about their efforts is their focus is on minimum weight and minimum demand for electricity. Their prototypes have a maximum speed of 28 kilometres an hour, and they've tested them successfully on a 280-kilometre run.

Instead of heavy conventional lead-acid batteries, they use cellphone batteries assembled into packs of up to 48. A pack weighs a fraction of a conventional battery, and can be recharged from the solar cells in 20 minutes. A conventional battery can take up to 12 hours to recharge.

A vehicle will have three to five cellphone battery packs. It will run on one, and when that is depleted, the driver switches to another, allowing the depleted one to recharge on the go.

Fisher and Scully buy solar cells and cell phone batteries from stores selling surplus gods for about $3 a cell or battery. Parts for the entire vehicle come to about $1,600. The prototype in the photograph weighs 136 kilograms, and can carry up to its own weight.

It's driven by two magnets in the hub of the front wheel. Pulses of electricity are sent to the magnets, creating a negative charge on each. Since negative charges repel, the repelling force is used to turn the wheel. Speed is varied by changing the frequency of pulses going to the magnets. The more pulses, the greater the repelling force, and the faster the speed.

The factory where the prototypes are being developed is owned by Scully. Thirty years old, he graduated as an English major, and is the fifth generation to head William Scully Ltd., a manufacturer of regimental clothing and insignia that employs 30 people.

Fisher is a 62-year-old former hippy, who created psychedelic light shows in the sixties, and then moved into electronic, psychedelic art. With Fisher, you don't have a conversation. You listen to a rapid-fire discourse that can range from the molecular composition of the thyroid gland, to nanotechnology, to the fine points of soldering, all within the time space of a hiccup. He supplies the technical expertise, Scully offers organizational skills and articulates the vision. In partnership, they fit hand in glove.

Their web sites at www.solarvehicles.org, and www.uprightsolar.com contain technical drawings which are free to anyone wanting them. They ask only to be informed of improvements. Since the beginning of January, they've recorded 17,088 visits to the sites.

"We're spreading these ideas like spores all over the world," Fisher says. The spores will germinate, new ideas will sprout, and the world will change, of that the two of them have no doubt.