FIRST OPEN SOURCE VEHICLE

Local Motors’ community was asked to develop a vehicle body design that could support two types of missions – Combat Reconnaissance and Combat Delivery & Evacuation. Participants in the challenge submitted their designs online for review. Feedback from the community of more than 12,000 designers and enthusiasts enabled participants to incorporate novel ideas and concepts from their peers, helping to create a better vehicle in an open source process. After receiving and validating more than 150 design entries, Victor Garcia’s FLYPMode design was named the winner of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Crowd-derived Combat-support vehicle (XC2V) Design Challenge and was subsequently built into an operational prototype. The winning vehicle went from concept to working prototype in less than six months.

Local Motors is a new American car company setting an exciting and sustainable course to design, manufacture, and sell cars. With a focus on streamlining product development, Local Motors is pioneering a new manufacturing paradigm based upon online crowdsourcing for product co-creation where a virtual community collaborates to leverage the collective knowledge base in order to develop the most optimal solution. All chassis and body vehicle data is shared to make the car building and modding experience more enjoyable. Local Motors will build micro-factories in regions where demand is highest. Cars are built and sold from the micro-factories on a just-in-time basis.