Tell us about Open Source Car Design.
Reporter's Notebook
Assignment 
Do you know anything about how cars are traditionally designed? Tell us some of the specifics about why the open source car design project is different. Could this idea really take off? What, if any, are the environmental possiblities of a succesful open source car design? We won't know until you report on it.
Spend some time looking into the project and tell us what you find out. Provide key quotes and examples. What do you about the future of car design?
Background
Ride of your life
The Ride of Your Life project aims to innovate car design using open source principles.
The founder, Markus Merz, told NewAssignment.Net reporter Erik Krangel. "I believe in the basic need of the individual for mobility, but not the way the automobile industry is fulfilling that need from an environmental point of view. There is space for innovation in this field.” The project has moved along since Krangel reported on it. Let's find out what is going on and how close they are to a real, practical and efficient open source car design.
Below is reporting from NewAssignment.Net reporter Erik Krangel.
Designing a car from scratch has long been an amusing mental exercise for automotive hobbyists, or a quirky team project for undergraduate engineers at places like MIT or the University of Pennsylvania. But, Germany’s Markus Merz wants to go farther, he’s the brains behind the OScar project, a vastly ambitious plan to design and build automobiles using open-design principles.
“I believe in the basic need of the individual for mobility, but not the way the automobile industry is fulfilling that need from an environmental point of view,” Merz told NewAssignment.Net. “There is space for innovation in this field.”
For Merz, the process of collaborative design for aluminum and rubber is no different than for Linux and Firefox. Or, as Merz would have it, “hardware” over “software.”
“It’s about being modular without having too many modules,” Merz said. He’s broken down OScar’s design to six such modules: Board (the drivetrain), Body (chassis), Engines, Power, Safety, and Information Systems. Once the coupling points are agreed upon, design for each module can run independently. And as a bonus, a modular design allows the theoretical OScar driver to swap parts as needed, easily changing a passenger car to a pick-up truck.
That’s the idea, anyway. OScar is perpetually mired in “the early conceptual stage.”
“We haven’t frozen the design. We’re still trying to bring the right people together,” Merz said. So far, close to 2,000 people have signed up on the OScar design boards. Consistent with other open-source projects, Merz estimates about 90 percent of those people just watch the site, 9 percent post occasionally, and a core 1 percent of the group is active in moving the project along. For an idea Merz first came up with in 1999, he now says -- “I hope to have it complete in my lifetime.”
With open source software, contributors have the instant gratification of seeing their work validated and bundled into a rollout that’s quickly distributed to millions of users. With hardware, particularly something as complex as an automobile, the slowness and “will anything ever come of it?” perception can create an uphill battle. But the difference between designing a car and designing a browser might not be as big as people think. “Every car manufacturer tries to keep the design strictly virtual for as long as possible,” Merz said. “There’s nothing new in what we’re doing.” Once the design is complete, he’d market it to manufacturers.
Whether we’ll ever see OScars on the roads is an open question, but as a social experiment in open design OScar may teach lessons to other, more modest open source projects.
“The hardest part is finding the right people to work on something bigger than themselves,” Merz said. But Merz still believes that collaborative input based on free will and good intentions is a superior design model to profit-driven companies who appoint executives to set tasks and enforce deadlines. “If you compare 1999 to now, I’m a little more conventional in terms of structure,” Merz said. “But I still don’t think a boss needs to be a jerk.”
Eric Krangel is a student in the journalism program at Columbia University. His work has appeared in numerous papers including the Chicago Tribune and the New York Sun.
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Contest to develop 100 Miles a Gallon Car
Assignment:
Reporting page:
Did you see this New York Times Story published today:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/02/business/02xprize.html?_r=1&ref=busine...
Here is the first quarter of the story.
Seeking a Car That Gets 100 Miles a Gallon
By NICK BUNKLEY
Published: April 2, 2007
The race is on to develop a commercially viable car that can travel 100 miles on a gallon of gasoline.
The same group that awarded $10 million to a team that built the first private spacecraft to leave the earth’s atmosphere is expected to announce today the rules for its automotive competition.
The group, the X Prize Foundation, says that the automotive contest, expected to carry a prize of more than $10 million, could have a significant effect on the automobile industry by speeding up efforts to use alternative fuels and reduce consumption. The average fuel economy of vehicles sold in the United States has remained nearly stagnant — around 20 miles a gallon — for decades.
“The industry is stuck, and we think a prize is perfect to disrupt that dynamic,” said Mark Goodstein, executive director of the Automotive X Prize. “Failure is frowned upon in this industry, and that doesn’t make for big advances. It makes for incrementalism.”
Even before it began publicizing a draft of the rules for the competition, the foundation had fielded inquiries from more than 1,000 potential contestants and institutions willing to participate. Many major automakers have also expressed interest in monitoring the contest, including some that are considering competing themselves.
4/2/07
Car Design of the Future
jdbridenAssignment:
Reporting page:
Typically car design is done by a group of individuals that have completed design school. They use programs like AutoCAD to put their ideas onto the computer in a simulated 3-D model. Most of the development of a car happens on the computer because it is far less expensive than building and testing all sorts of prospective models. They then will make a scaled clay model and improve upon it until they make a life size clay model. Then they use that model to help cast molds for the exterior parts.
Millions of dollars are spent by the big automakers on research and development to ensure that their new concept vehicles will meet the standards of the car of tomorrow.
With this open source car design “ a community of automobile developers, their primary goal was to design and develop a car over the Internet.” This could be one of the reasons that they want to design a simple car because they can’t have huge documents on the web or it would take forever to access them. “If the OScar project led to a complete and feasible design of a new automobile, it should be possible to sell it to one of the major car manufacturers.” Making it feasible for this car of the future to have the input of actual users of the product would help sales tremendously. I used to be a car salesman and there are always customers who want options that are not offered on the car. If these customers had enough numbers and all commented on OScar then it might actually make it to production.
The wheel-hub engines they mention are not cheap, in an article they have four of them on a mini cooper and it costs over $650,000.
I think car design will eventually involve more people than it currently does but I do not think it will completely be designed over the Internet. Another thing to remember is this car is going to have to compete with the cars of the future from the big automakers if they don’t buy the concept.
3/26/07
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