Surely there is an open source car by now. Some sort of street legal kit?
I do think open source car is the best label to describe what I’m dreaming of. But factory built to take advantage of bulk order pricing for the parts and because people who are actually willing and able to put their own car together are rare.
Nope, at least afaik. Prototyping and building cars by hand (without a whole factory set up to build it) is hard. Not to mention extremely expensive. And you have to build multiple (identical) copies of the prototype to get it street legal, because of crash testing. And you have to be able to guarantee that what people build with your kit remains identical to your prototype. Or everyone assembling such a kit would have to build multiple copies of the car and go through the certification process individually.
And of course there are very few people that would want to assemble their own car, so you wouldn’t be able to make a business out of it.
I’ve seen a few builds from scratch online. All of them say it turned out to be far FAR more difficult than they ever imagined. Once the thing works properly, it’s up to what state/ country the builder is in to determine how hard or easy it is to get it legal to drive on the road.
Surely there is an open source car by now. Some sort of street legal kit?
I do think open source car is the best label to describe what I’m dreaming of. But factory built to take advantage of bulk order pricing for the parts and because people who are actually willing and able to put their own car together are rare.
Nope, at least afaik. Prototyping and building cars by hand (without a whole factory set up to build it) is hard. Not to mention extremely expensive. And you have to build multiple (identical) copies of the prototype to get it street legal, because of crash testing. And you have to be able to guarantee that what people build with your kit remains identical to your prototype. Or everyone assembling such a kit would have to build multiple copies of the car and go through the certification process individually.
And of course there are very few people that would want to assemble their own car, so you wouldn’t be able to make a business out of it.
I’ve seen a few builds from scratch online. All of them say it turned out to be far FAR more difficult than they ever imagined. Once the thing works properly, it’s up to what state/ country the builder is in to determine how hard or easy it is to get it legal to drive on the road.
I did a moped over a 3 day weekend. That was a lot of fun. The state required me to get a mechanic to sign off on it.