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Open Source Car on the Horizon
PreacherTom writes "So here's a question: can open-source practices and approaches be applied to make hardware, to create tangible and physical objects, including complex ones? Markus Merz believes they can. The young German is the founder of the OScar project, whose goal is to develop and build a car according to open-source principles. Merz and his team aren't going for a super-accessorized SUV — they're aiming at designing a simple and functionally smart car. The OScar is not the only open-source hardware project out there: others include Zero Prestige, which designs kites and kite-powered vehicles, and Open Prosthetics, which offers free exchange of designs for prosthetic devices."
As long as it doesn't end up with a bunch of people bickering over what color to make the the cup holder.
Here's what it looks like: pic
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
The young German is the founder of the OScar project, whose goal is to develop and build a car according to open-source principles.
Does that mean it will crash less than other cars?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Auto mechanics will come out of nowhere to help fix your car and get you on your way. A representative from AAA will complain that open source mechanics don't do a great job as traditional (but expensive) mechanics.
Merz says that while building a car today "is mainly software, until a certain point anyway,"
Not a car I would ever drive... I prefer my cars with *no* software.
I still want to buy "The Homer" from Powell Motors.
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Open-source principles will be good for innovation.
But there will be a BIG problem with laws - especially mandated safety and emissions testing.
That's designed on the assumption that large numbers of essentially identical cars are produced by well-funded manufacturers, so the cost of a lot of crash and emission-control testing and design work can be spread out over many units and become affordable.
Even if you are building using zero-emission or well-tested stock power plants, good luck on getting the safety-testing requirements relaxed. A poorly-designed car endangers, not just those in it, but those in vehicles around it.
With cars the "blue screen of death" is literal.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It's a cool idea, but there's a few practical problems. Firstly, open source works for software because an intelligent person can pick up a few books and learn how to write code. Designing a car has a higher barrier to entry. Secondly, lacking the ability to run complex simulations on a car design, much less to produce prototypes for testing, will put an open source car at a disadvantage. Finally, who would mass-manufacture such a vehicle? I'm not saying it's impossible but there are many obstacles to overcome.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
I think the most important part of Open Source development of ANYTHING is standards. You need to have a standards body. The problem with the auto industry today is there are no real standards. Take for example custom wheels--a simple, non-moving piece of metal that basically holds the tire. It's main purpose is cosmetic after the basic functionality that all wheels share (round, has bolt holes in the middle, etc.). You'd think it would be simple to get a different wheel for your car, but if you ever try you'll find hundreds of different widths, bolt-patterns, diameters, etc.
This Open Source car would only be better if there were standards employed in these particular sections. Or have any connections be customizeable on both sides of the connection. So, if someone invents a better wheel pattern, it's easy to change the disc brake assembly to to fit it (dependency).
The problem is that just having the design isn't going to get you very far because of the specialized components involved. A car is very expensive to build but at million plus quantities it's very cheap. But try to one-off one gear for a transmission sometime (it'll be THOUSANDS to get the precision in a $900 off-the-shelf manual transmission like Mazda makes for Ford).
Instead, from the design stage, standardize everything. A standard ring or star topology for communications and power bussing throughout the car. Then each powered device has a microcontroller that turns it off or on. Then the microcontroller can report back it's status to a central computer. Most of the electricals are easily standardized. Where you run into problems is precision machined steel parts of an engine and transmission. Replacing also those with electrics is the way to go. Use electric motors, magnetic suspension, etc. Modular body panels can have their own microcontrollers also, so the car can reconfigure itself based on what you have mounted. You have the rear door in place, the rear door up/down button appears on the interface. The top is off, no sense showing the moonroof control. Etc etc.
RFC's and the like are what's really made stuff like linux possible. It's not just having the source but having the standards that really make everything easy to work with, and make sure that many different programmers can all work on different sections of the project without worrying about if their module can talk with the others.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Blue or I walk.
Sweet informative mod.
As much as I like the idea, they've tacked the wrong problem. It's not the car that needs designing, its the manufacturing systems that need designing. Until they can manufacture 1,000,000 of their cars for under $20,000 ea (if they want middle-class buyers in developed nations), or 10,000,000 for under $10,000 ea (if they want worldwide volume), or 100,000,000 for under $5,000 ea (if they want to pre-empt the environmental nightmare of 1 billion new cars in China & India), they've done nothing to address the problem of transportation's contribution to global environmental problems. Form may follow function, but manufacturing defines what form you can make and sell.
As cool as their renderings and open-source specs are, they do nothing to address the real problem. And before someone claims that this is only a concept and that manufacturing can come later, they need to know that 80%-90% of the cost of something is baked in during the design phase (the figure comes from companies such as Volkswagen and Lucent). If manufacturing is an afterthought, there's no hope of getting the costs down because it's too late. Maybe a few stock-option millionaire geeks will be able to spring for the vehicle, but it will never hit a price point that sells the volume that makes a difference.
I hope they switch the focus of the effort to make a breakthrough in manufacturing systems. That would be really cool!
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Crashing can be reduced by reducing the dangers. The maximum speed is easy to set. Next, you can limit or warn about following distance. You could also detect a vehicle following you, and emit some warning brake pattern. Erratic (swerving due to some distraction/impairment) driving behavior could be detected and warned (perhaps it could switch to safer limits too).
I see where you're going with this. Perhaps if we put some sort of sentience in charge of controlling the vehicle, we could accomplish all of those things; maybe an organic neural net, but those take about 9 months to grow, and I think it's illegal to sell them since they ratified the 13th amendment.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I do every day. Its called 'rush hour'.
Car ownership has to be individual for a good reason: people don't take care of things they don't own.
Ideas about collectively-owned cars have been bandied about here on Slashdot for years, but no one's ever gotten very far in the real world with the idea. The problem is that, while it'd be nice to just "check out" a car on those days you needed one for a weekend excursion or trip across town, you're likely to get a car that has discarded fast food containers or used condoms lying around inside it, and worse which may have damage from being recklessly driven or unmaintained.
Of course, if you go to the next step and propose having some company manage these cars, maintaining them properly and cleaning them out when people bring them back, well, that's exactly what Hertz and Avis do. So why not just use them instead of owning your own car? Oh yeah, because it costs a small fortune per day to rent cars instead of owning one outright. And that's with many competitors in the business to keep prices as low as possible.
While it's inefficient for everyone to own a car when they don't need it all the time, it's even less efficient to share cars and employ people in an organization to do all the work necessary to make that happen.