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April 10, 2007

An Open Source car?!?

I thought Open Source beer was absurd, but now someone claims to be building an Open Source car. As with the beer, the difficult part of building a car isn't that you're missing a design. It's that manufacturing it has very large economies of scale. Even something as simple and relatively forgiving as a bumper or tire requires a fairly substantial manufacturing operation. Now take a look at a carburetor:

Now, I've done a bit of metalwork and given enough time, the specs, and tens of thousands of dollars worth of machine tools I could probably actually manage to manufacture a semi-working carburetor, but it would take me weeks and here's an object that costs about $120 if you buy it retail. Now, a carb has a lot of moving parts but it doesn't take a lot of stress or have particularly fine tolerances, unlike, say, a piston or the frame. Now, of course you could say you'll buy anything really complicated as parts, but it quickly turns out that that's more or less the whole car. I guess you could still open source the pattern for those fuzzy dice...

Posted by ekr at April 10, 2007 6:20 AM | Filed under: Misc

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