collaborative car design
Why can’t you plug a version 2.0 component into your car to replace that 1.9b or why can’t you exchange a diesel engine for a gas one? Why can’t you do that? Because it wasn’t designed as such: neither the notion of car-consumption, nor the car itself.
Several collaborative car design initiatives are seeking to redesign the car: to make it smarter, make it cleaner, make it cooler.
We already wrote about Markus Merz & Co’s OScar a while ago, but also check out the Society for Sustainable Mobility’s Open Source Green Vehicle Project, aka Kernel with its modular (nearly) ‘hot-swappable’ design. Or have a look at the Vehicle Design Summit‘s goal to collaboratively build a plugin-hybrid, low-cost, 200-mpg four seater for the Indian market. Also the big boys are in: Sabic‘s set up C,mm,n, an open-source car project ran by 3 three technical universities in the Netherlands. Then there is always the (Progressive) Automotive X Prize Foundation putting $10 million on the table for any team that comes up with a practical mass-producable car getting at least 100mpg (see also here).
As one can notice most initiatives focus on energy (if not fuel) efficiency, some also focus on materials, while few take a full 360° view on production, consumption, waste cycles etc. They are all still counting in gallons, the cars still look like ‘todays cars’. This both means that the threshold for people to switch to such a ‘car’ will be low, yet it also shows how the traditional concept of a car as we know it remains unaltered, hence raising the question as to where the real long view lies. Radical innovation is needed and efforts in this direction thus ought to question deeper lying assumptions of what a car is, could and should be.
Via FastCompany
Image by OSGV
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