Few things seem to excite car designers more than the concept cars they wheel out at international motor shows. Each year gleaming displays of futuristic styling grace the circuit, revealing ever-sleeker lines and tantalising technology that promises to do away with the car’s deadly addiction to carbon-based fuel.
Sadly for environmentalists and futurists alike, these cars rarely go into production. But there’s another kind of concept car taking shape on the internet that, one day, just might. Far from the glare of the motor show is a car called the OScar. A concept car with a twist, OScar is being developed by a loose tangle of car designers, engineers and programmers — most working in their spare time — out to challenge the might of the big car makers.
OScar is taking shape using a single principle as its guiding light: it’s an open-source car. The open-source idea is borrowed from the software industry that makes its code freely available under licence; the Firefox web browser and the Linux operating system being the most famous examples.
Open to all
In the hard, metallic world of car design this means that instead of protecting OScar designs by use of restrictive patents, as is the norm, the design is effectively open to anyone willing to contribute. And that does mean anyone. Like a much more complicated version of Wikipedia, OScar is being argued over by volunteer car designers, 60% of whom are moonlighting from within the car industry.
Tens of thousands have signed up to the project, but in reality OScar is being driven by a core team of a few dozen, and steered by just one man. Markus Merz has for the past six years been trying to direct the design and development of a prototype car using the anarchic principles of open source. Although he is in the driving seat, decisions are based on a democratic system and everybody — including individual designers, companies, universities and other organisations — can participate. (You can too, just by signing up).
Merz was raised on a Bavarian farm in the shadow of a large BMW plant, where he was eventually recruited to work on the production line. Soon he was promoted to the marketing department and eventually played an influential role developing the company’s new media strategy. There he first encountered the principles of open-source software and, while observing that the cars being developed by BMW were (and are) being designed almost exclusively in virtual space, he began to wonder whether he could design a basic prototype combining the two.
OScar might well be a car of the future, but it is as about as basic as the car your dad used to drive. In performance terms, it’s somewhere between the original Volkswagen Beetle and a Mark 1 Golf, and has a top speed of just 144km/h. It should be sturdy and made from a minimum number of mechanical parts, but beyond that, the project has one fundamental rule: that the design should be freely available to every member of its community.
But OScar also makes another technological leap. Using a modular concept borrowed from computer manufacture, OScar uses six discrete parts. Each module — the drivetrain (the car equivalent of a PC’s motherboard), body, engine, power, safety and information systems — are being designed independently and, crucially, just like a computer, each can be mixed and matched with other modular components, so a future manufacturer could swap parts as needed, easily adapting a passenger car to a pick-up truck.
You could argue that any car can be customised and changed into something else. Pimp My Ride wouldn’t exist otherwise. But the modular approach means that a car, in theory, could be manufactured en masse because of its open-source nature. Here the ultimate destination of OScar goes foggy, but the intention goes something like this: traditionally, car designs are protected by patents. So a small plant in, say, Botswana or Bangladesh must pay for a licence to produce the designs. A car under an “open licence” can be produced without those additional costs. At least one barrier to production is removed.
Alternative approach
It has often been written that the age of the individual inventor is over. Corporations now dominate the development of new inventions, the argument goes, and our future belongs to ever-larger multinational companies that will protect their inventions ever more aggressively. But study how many web-based applications are produced and you see that there is an alternative.
An open-source invention — be it the code for the popular Firefox browser or the blueprints for a $100 laptop — operates under open-source principles. Until very recently, this has only thrived in the weightless world of computer code. But now pioneers like Merz are trying to break their ideas in the physical world. Others are not so sure that the ideas can be so easily transposed.
As one blogger pointed out on Metafilter.com recently: “Open-source software thrives because it’s easily transportable … When hardware comes into the picture, you suddenly have to contend with fabrication, distribution, packaging, etc. And at every step of the way you will be dealing with people who won’t see it as a ‘community project’ but as a pay cheque for something they are physically building or distributing.”
There are other reasons why OScar’s journey towards production may not be such a smooth ride, says Merz. “There are some legal problems here,” he says. “If someone is, for instance, a drivetrain engineer working at, for example, Mercedes Benz and they are working anonymously on our platform, it could conflict with their working contract because of the knowledge they put in to the project.”
Indeed, Michael Blabst, a spokesperson for BMW’s innovation department, is sceptical that OScar will make it out of the garage. “It’s a nice creative idea for enthusiastic people,” he says, “but one that is of course strongly limited. [I think it suitable] for developing a very early concept. But more will not be possible. Car development has to be strongly organised and takes up to five years. [Making] a car means to bring together up to 20 000 parts in a perfect way.”
Merz admits that OScar is a hobby. But lest we forget, Karl Benz’s invention of the first motor car was part of a lifelong hobby. His great rivals, Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach, developed a rival internal-combustion engine in a makeshift garage in Daimler’s garden. The car was invented and built by hobbyists. Its future may call on them again. — Guardian Unlimited Â