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Open Source Car on the Horizon
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Dec 08, 2006 05:08 PM
from the will-it-burn-penguins-for-fuel dept.
from the will-it-burn-penguins-for-fuel dept.
PreacherTom writes "So here's a question: can open-source practices and approaches be applied to make hardware, to create tangible and physical objects, including complex ones? Markus Merz believes they can. The young German is the founder of the OScar project, whose goal is to develop and build a car according to open-source principles. Merz and his team aren't going for a super-accessorized SUV — they're aiming at designing a simple and functionally smart car. The OScar is not the only open-source hardware project out there: others include Zero Prestige, which designs kites and kite-powered vehicles, and Open Prosthetics, which offers free exchange of designs for prosthetic devices."
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Great (Score:2, Funny)
Blue, dammit. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Pic (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That's obviously the car on the Gnome desktop. Damn it! Why won't people learn that posting screenshots of new distros makes no sense if they all use the KDE/Gnome/XFCE/Fluxbox/your_preferred_WM_here paradigm?
Re:Pic (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
does that mean.. (Score:5, Funny)
Does that mean it will crash less than other cars?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well, if the speed and tailgating is auto-limit (Score:3, Funny)
I see where you're going with this. Perhaps if we put some sort of sentience in charge of controlling the vehicle, we could accomplish all of
If your open source car breaks down... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:If your open source car breaks down... (Score:5, Insightful)
"You will have to search out mechanics on your own, and in most cases if you find them they will laugh at you for being too stupid to use the car, and point you to libraries spread throughout the country. In each of those libraries there will be manuals that give small, different chunks that sort of relate to the problem you're having. Sometimes you will be lucky enough to find a mechanic who has seen your problem before, and actually gives you a straight answer and gets you back on the road. But good luck on the rest of the times."
Parent
Like Linux... (Score:2)
"mainly software??" (Score:3, Insightful)
Not a car I would ever drive... I prefer my cars with *no* software.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"mainly software??" (Score:5, Informative)
I'm with you, in that I drive older cars, mostly for this reason. I'm all for this "open source car" thing, though; at a certain point the future, virtually every car on the market will have a computer in it. Do we want to be able to service these things ourselves, or are we going to have to take them to a Certified Mechanic who needs an expensive proprietary interface to work on the car?
Second: Older cars have the same problem. "What? They do not!" you say! Yes, yes they do. How much money does it cost for all the specialized tools needed in vehicle repair? Flare nut wrenches? No use other than brake jobs. Flywheel puller? Special presses?
You already need to use expensive, sometimes proprietary (Ford fuel line disconnect) tools to do the job, how is that different than needing to connect a car up to a computer interface?
BTW, you will find that those fancy computer interfaces can be had for under 200 bucks, which is less than many of your single-purpose tools needed for car work and supports a whole suite of diagnostic purposes.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You are, I hope, aware that modern ABS systems typically give a shorter stopping distance than even a talented driver, on any surface other than dry tarmac?
What isn't open about cars? (Score:2)
What else really is there to protect?
Everything else is trivially reverse engineered. Each of the major MFGs has engineering teams that buy new cars & strip them down to the bare chassis & then do an inventory to figure out how much their competitors are spending.
Software is really the only black box in a car.
Simpsons did it (Score:4, Funny)
Main problem will be laws. (Score:5, Interesting)
But there will be a BIG problem with laws - especially mandated safety and emissions testing.
That's designed on the assumption that large numbers of essentially identical cars are produced by well-funded manufacturers, so the cost of a lot of crash and emission-control testing and design work can be spread out over many units and become affordable.
Even if you are building using zero-emission or well-tested stock power plants, good luck on getting the safety-testing requirements relaxed. A poorly-designed car endangers, not just those in it, but those in vehicles around it.
With cars the "blue screen of death" is literal.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You are permitted one custom car per lifetime. If you wreck it, sometimes you can get away with a re-vin where the vin is transferred to a new vehicle, but usually not - you have to fix the original. Well, let me elaborate - sometimes yo
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That is a VERY interesting statement. Where does this law come from?? I've been to the sites where you can order these kit cars...and I've not seen any indication of this as a fact. Do you have some links or pointers to info on this?
I'd think at the very least...this might vary from state to state....I mean car laws are weird state to state...I hear all the time about people who have to get their cars emission tested...strict laws on mods (mostly from CA),
An open source car? (Score:3, Interesting)
Standards (Score:5, Insightful)
This Open Source car would only be better if there were standards employed in these particular sections. Or have any connections be customizeable on both sides of the connection. So, if someone invents a better wheel pattern, it's easy to change the disc brake assembly to to fit it (dependency).
The problem is that just having the design isn't going to get you very far because of the specialized components involved. A car is very expensive to build but at million plus quantities it's very cheap. But try to one-off one gear for a transmission sometime (it'll be THOUSANDS to get the precision in a $900 off-the-shelf manual transmission like Mazda makes for Ford).
Instead, from the design stage, standardize everything. A standard ring or star topology for communications and power bussing throughout the car. Then each powered device has a microcontroller that turns it off or on. Then the microcontroller can report back it's status to a central computer. Most of the electricals are easily standardized. Where you run into problems is precision machined steel parts of an engine and transmission. Replacing also those with electrics is the way to go. Use electric motors, magnetic suspension, etc. Modular body panels can have their own microcontrollers also, so the car can reconfigure itself based on what you have mounted. You have the rear door in place, the rear door up/down button appears on the interface. The top is off, no sense showing the moonroof control. Etc etc.
RFC's and the like are what's really made stuff like linux possible. It's not just having the source but having the standards that really make everything easy to work with, and make sure that many different programmers can all work on different sections of the project without worrying about if their module can talk with the others.
They've tackled the wrong problem (Score:4, Informative)
As cool as their renderings and open-source specs are, they do nothing to address the real problem. And before someone claims that this is only a concept and that manufacturing can come later, they need to know that 80%-90% of the cost of something is baked in during the design phase (the figure comes from companies such as Volkswagen and Lucent). If manufacturing is an afterthought, there's no hope of getting the costs down because it's too late. Maybe a few stock-option millionaire geeks will be able to spring for the vehicle, but it will never hit a price point that sells the volume that makes a difference.
I hope they switch the focus of the effort to make a breakthrough in manufacturing systems. That would be really cool!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Ideas about collectively-owned cars have been bandied about here on Slashdot for years, but no one's ever gotten very far in the real world with the idea. The problem is that, while it'd be nice to just "check out" a car on those days you needed one for a weekend excursion or trip across town, you're likely to get a car that has discarded fast food containers or used condoms lying around inside it, and wor