A growing number of organisations in the automotive sector are creating open-source software platforms that enable component suppliers, customers and other stakeholders to take an active role in vehicle design. Start-up companies such as StreetScooter, Local Motors and OSVehicle are busy grabbing a slice of this emerging market – and large OEMs like Renault are also waking up to the potential of the new approach.
One of the pioneers in open-source vehicle design is California-based start-up OSVehicle which, since April 2015, has provided a ready-to-use hardware platform – known as Tabby Evo – that it claims enables companies to produce complete electric vehicles (EVs) in half the time and at a sixth of the cost. Potential users are able to freely download the platform’s 3D open-source files at any time and start developing the exterior bodies of EVs with free CAD software.
As Yuki Liu, co-founder and chief operating officer at OSVehicle, explains, developers can work in three categories – traditional highway-ready cars such as those offered by Toyota and Tesla; heavy quadricycles, limited to 55mph, “of the type popular in Europe and China”; and light quadricycles limited to 25mph.
As well as the software, users are also able to order Tabby Evo parts – such as chassis, electric motors, lithium batteries, battery management systems, seats and wheels – and start working on a running prototype. They can also eventually ask for additional services such as design, engineering and legal approvals.
According to Liu, although the average cost of manufacturing this platform is estimated at $100,000, excluding any associated R&D expenses, the fact that OSVehicle is able to “aggregate the demand of different projects” means that the company is able to offer it “for at least three times less”.
“When you think of electric vehicles,” she says, “you think of Tesla and the
$1.5 trillion passenger cars market. But there’s a whole other market for vehicles with speciality functions – patrol, parking enforcement, last-mile delivery, car-sharing, self-driving fleets, agriculture, off-road and low-speed vehicles – that accounts for another $600 billion.
“All of these speciality vehicle manufacturers want to transition to electric, but they don’t have the know-how – and governments of many countries are already demanding this transition.”
Much of the user base for the Tabby Evo system is focused on serving niche markets. Typical customers are drawn from sectors such as speciality vehicles, IT, car and ride sharing, self-driving and connected car technologies, logistics and government.
Liu says many customers have added to the basic platform and developed novel EVs, such as “vehicles that can run for more than 20 years”, as well as self-driving EVs for urban or agricultural areas, special vehicles for peacekeeping and rescue that can be dropped by air, connected cars, last-mile delivery fleets, 100% zero-impact vehicles charged by solar power, commuter car-sharing vehicles and multi-purpose vehicles for Third World countries.
She believes that the OSVehicle approach enables such companies to establish more sustainable business models. They avoid spending money and time making the vehicle platform and don’t need to invest in “giga factories” because open-source technology allows them to “start lean and distributed”.
“This is also why, instead of hundreds of millions of dollars, the least expensive vehicle developed with OSVehicle requires 10 times less capital,” she says. “This is a case of using a technology available to anyone to disrupt an old but very large and inefficient industry.
“Entrepreneurs love OSVehicle because, for the first time in the industry, it empowers them to create projects with low entry barriers through a ready-to-use technology in open source. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel each time.”
Another of the early front-runners in the use of open-source vehicle design is Arizona-based Local Motors, which has used the approach to produce its flagship Olli EV and a range of other innovative vehicles, including the Rally Fighter, Racer, Verrado, Dominos UDV and Dubai Roadster models – as well as the Swim/Sport and Zelator Drone prototypes.
As Alex Fiechter, head of product development at Local Motors, explains, the chief difference between the company’s design process and more traditional approaches centres on the tools used – in particular the novel Forth open-source platform. In his view, working with a large crowd of people in “co-creation” activities is really about the augmentation of existing resources and the discovery that best practices “already arrived at for vehicle development on a programmatic level are also helpful for the broader development community”.
“This goes for what resources you provide them as well,” says Fiechter. “If you would have given your internal team access to certain CAD data, for example, then you should expect to have to provide that to the crowd as well if you are asking for the same level of deliverable.
“But there is an attitude and motivational difference between when you are an employee as opposed to being an honorary team member.” For Fiechter, such motivational differences are at least partially addressed by leveraging the Forth platform to help create a “collaborative environment” that recognises members of the vehicle design community as “professional contributors” – but also recognises the “recreational element” to their participation.
Fiechter believes that now is a very interesting time to explore the potential of open source, because the world is confronted with two technologies – cognitive artificial intelligence and autonomous driving – that are “gaining traction and require the crowd to be included on some level”. In view of the fact that these technologies encompass “such a broad reach of functionality and impact to the individual”, and will confront us with many “unique and nuanced situations”, he predicts that organisations “won’t be able to collect data fast enough unless they take the open-source route”.
“For both these technologies, data is the fuel,” he says. “Now exactly what you do with that data is something where there may be some value in keeping it internal, but the acquisition of it must be open. The argument can be made, though, that even in the ‘doing’ it is valuable to open up to the crowd, again, because the situations are so diverse.”
But Fiechter also points to challenges. For him, one of the biggest hurdles relates to what he describes as “solution validation” and the difficulty of evaluating performance across extended groups.
“Because you may be dealing with new people all the time, their work may not be a known quantity,” he says. “One of the most effective ways of evaluating the crowd is with the crowd – for example via peer review. Having tools to support this is important, because there are a number of ways you can do it, and really the more data you have, the better. This also brings up the value of trying to retain a community, because then you can start developing histories around people, and, even if your answer provider is new, your peer reviewer can be a known quantity.”
The future looks rosy for open-source vehicle design. Renault has used the OSVehicle platform to develop the POM, a compact EV based on its Twizy model. Available to “start-ups, private customers and researchers,” the POM also allows third parties to “copy and modify existing software to create a totally customisable electric vehicle,” says the company.
Meanwhile, Liu reveals that OSVehicle is developing the “first complete and entirely modular and open-source electric vehicle”. When completed, she says that the EV will be available as a “white label,” enabling companies to introduce their own branding. It will be “easy to personalise, repair and upgrade with connected and even self-driving technologies”.
She adds: “We are focusing on unserved market niches by empowering entrepreneurs to solve specific needs in mobility using a standard hardware platform, so we are not going to be another Toyota or Tesla. OSVehicle is different: our technology is not just electric, it is also modular, designed and engineered for services, easy to repair and upgrade. This is what we call future-proof – our vehicles can potentially last more than 20 years.”