Local Motors Test Drives Community Built Rally Fighter

Local Motors is a startup that I fell in love with the first time I saw them pitch at a WebInno conference in Boston more than a year ago. I've been following them ever since. Not only because they have an insanely cool product, but because their model represents a vision for how products can be developed in the future.

A few years ago, it would be hard to imagine that someone could start a car company with $4 million in venture funding and actually produce an extremely functional, drivable, production ready car to sell. Jay Rogers, the CEO and co-founder of Local Motors, has done just that and now has nearly 60 people waiting inline to build their own Rally Fighter. 

The Rally Fighter is designed by members of the Local Motor community who compete and collaborate in competitions to model various different pieces of the car. The community provides feedback, votes on changes and the car they'd like to see developed. They then collaborate with the Local Motors team to spec and build the car alongside them. Let me emphasize this...the car is entirely designed by the community! The team at Local Motors then assembles the car with a working model that others can purchase and then build their own similar to how you might build a model car, except life size. Now take a look at the finished Rally Fighter. From initial sketch to car enthusiast dream vehicle hitting the desert hills in Arizona ready for purchase.

I believe Local Motors is a vision for the future and represents the following trends that you should keep an eye on.

1. Companies will rely more heavily on customers to design their products. This may be done by crowdsourcing via design competitions or gathering more feedback upfront before product launches. Take a look at Quirky - submit a product idea, the audience votes, and winner gets put into production if there are enough pre-sale deposits.

2. Startups are becoming easier to start in industries beyond the web. SpaceX is not an example of an easy company to start. But in the extreme case, it shows that founders can use existing space technologies, apply a different launch model, and win billions of dollars in contracts to send satellites up to space.

3. Community driven collaboration is becoming the norm. Take a look at open source Drupal...now you can install Open Atrium for your intranet, Tattler is monitor conversations around a particular topic - say your company, Open Publish to build your blog with the latest semantic technologies, Managing News to keep tabs on articles, visualize data sources, and localize information on a map, PressFlow to scale your applications, and Acquia Drupal to build other applications. They're all distributions of Drupal that take pieces of effort from a community to give it back as a free product that everyone played a roll in building.

4. Large factories aren't needed to produce complicated products. The Rally Fighter was built in a garage shop near Buzzards bay in Massachusetts. They plan to produce the rest of their cars in micro factories as well. It's not about scaling up anymore, sustainability is also about scaling down.
 

5. Mass customization is the next iteration of mass production. Yes, we've seen this already, but there is still a way to go and Local Motors is a model for how other industries can be transformed.