The AppsLab

The Open Source Car by Local Motors

By Jake • March 19th, 2010 • 9 Comments

The last SXSW session Paul and I caught before leaving Austin was called “No Straight Lines: Straight Line Thinking Stops Here” given by Alan Moore (@alansmlxl).

I enjoyed his talk and found his ideas inspiring, and among many other things he covered was the story of Local Motors.

Local Motors is essentially an open source car company. Anyone can submit designs for the community to review. The designs are voted on, and when a design has a critical mass of support from the community, it graduates into production.

The production phase is transparent and local. Different geographical locations have different needs, so location matters.

Local Motors has small shops scattered throughout the US, the opposite of the monolithic, centralized manufacturing plant that is common for automakers.

Finally, when you buy a Local Motors car, you participate in the build process at your local shop.

What you get is a car that you helped design and build, tailored to where you live. Incidentally, being part of the process seems to make people less likely to default on their auto loans.

The first car to graduate is the Rally Fighter, which costs about $50,000. I found out too late that I could have seen a Rally Fighter in person at SXSW. If only it had been after the session.

Don’t care for the Rally Fighter? Check out the designs for one more to your liking.

I don’t feel like I’ve done Local Motors justice. So, here are a few of the bullets on how Local Motors is different.

• We will license a lightweight, superior safety, chassis that can be produced profitably at 2000 units/year within a $50,000 price point.
• On top of that we will layer design from our proprietary open source design community. This community empowers an army of hot-shot, competitive, designers from around the world to innovate and refine design.
• Our team specifies the target segment that fits the price point. The community delivers the innovation.
• Our team of can-do engineers and master machinists fit the winning design to the common chassis. These designs are then transferred to our network of suppliers who deliver the necessary sub-assemblies direct to the Local Motors facility on a JIT basis. All cars are assembled, tested for quality, and sold locally by a 20-person business unit at a facility with 1/100th the capital of today’s auto plants.

It’s a pretty revolutionary idea on a number of levels.

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