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 — who are out to challenge the might of the big car manufacturers.
OScar is taking shape using a single principle as its guiding light: it is an open-source car.
The open-source idea is borrowed from the software industry that makes its code freely available under licence, the most famous examples being the Firefox web browser and the Linux operating system.
In the hard, metallic world of car design, it 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 at theoscarproject.org.
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 still 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 is somewhere between the original Volkswagen Beetle and a Mark 1 Golf and has a top speed of just 145kmh.
It should be sturdy and made from a minimum number of mechanical parts, but beyond that the project has one fundamental rule: 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 mother-board), body, engine, power, safety and information systems — are being designed independently and, crucially, just like a computer, each part can be mixed and matched with other modular components. This means a future manufacturer could swap parts as needed and easily adapt a passenger car to a pick-up truck.
The modular approach means that, in theory, a car could be manufactured en masse because of its open-source nature. — Â