Alt Car Expo 2007: Open Source Vehicle Project (VIDEO)
Earlier this month, I interviewed two of the people behind the Open Source Green Vehicle Project for the AutoblogGreen podcast. As you probably remember, this is a project where the hivemind is trying to design a highly-efficient vehicle, with aspirations to join the Automotive X Prize and someday enter production.
While I was down at the Santa Monica Alt Car Expo last weekend, I spent some time in the OSGV booth, getting the visual spiel of the project from David Lee, who joined us for the podcast. You can watch his presentation in the four-minute video above. For more info on this car, the Kernal EV, or the OSGV project, you can read or listen to the Q&A or check out the project's website.
Reader Comments
(Page 1)3. Consider the problems that paid experts working full time have in developing and marketing a new car. Now consider that this "open source car" is the efforts of a bunch of amateurs working in their spare time for no pay other than a little ego boost. The chances of this coming to market, fully assembled and DOT approved, are somewhere between slim and none. I'd be suprised if they managed to build a working prototype. They simply don't have the funds to do crash testing or start manufacturing.
They might eventually sell the plans for a "build it yourself from scratch" car. If all the parts are readily available, they might even manage to offer an "assemble it yourself" kit car.
4. Hello Chris,
Dave here, the chairman of the group.
I would like to point out that for a regular car company there are more forces at work other than the engineers. Think about marketing, executives, servicing, dealerships, stock holders, etc. There is also existing infrastructure to worry about. That's a lot of status quo for engineers to overcome.
SSM-OSGV on the other hand, has no such worries. We are free to incorporate what we think is the best for mankind. Our core team is a group of highly experienced specialists from a number of industries outside of Detroit. Whether we are paid or not is rather irrelevant, because our team is better than what Detroit can ever be.
We are also working with a group of investors to bring our product to market in the schedule we've presented.
Add your comments
Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments.
When you enter your name and email address, you'll be sent a link to confirm your comment, and a password. To leave another comment, just use that password.
To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br> tags.
1. Does this mean the ECUs will all run on Linux?
Posted at 4:28PM on Oct 26th 2007 by steven