Car Of The Future? Open Source Vehicles.

[Crazed_Insanity]

Yeah, if you're thinking of making affordable electric cars, your way certain would be the cheapest way. However, think of all the labor necessary to retrofit a car, not sure if we can reach any significant mass volume with just hobbyists doing it in their garages. If you do build a special factory and plan on doing lots of retrofitting on Taurus, then I guess another issue would be all of a sudden Taurus used car prices would probably then shoot up?

I think unless perhaps if someday we can develop better in-wheel motors. Then the conversion would be piece of cake... just a matter of swapping out wheels. That'd instantly transform any vehicle into a hybrid/electric car without doing much retrofitting... and just stuff the batteries in the trunk...

Anyway, I guess my dream is that we can customize our cars based on variety of on the shelf parts as much as possible. Be able to pick and choose the best parts out of different companies. Kinda like PCs where you can just add on whatever CPU, memory, graphics card, HD, etc... in order to build your own dream machine. However, unlike PCs, vehicle chassis' not going to drastically improve in performance by that much over the years. It's just a piece of structure... unlike a PC's motherboard. Unless I crash it, I can pretty much stick with a single 'chassis' for the rest of my life and just trade-in and upgrade engines and whatever other parts in order to improve my cars performance... whether you want it to be fast or cheap or green.

I wonder how much would a Tesla S cost if we could put regular gas engine in there. Surely not $100k? And whatever IC engine you put in there, surely it'll perform better and more efficient considering how light and aero-dynamic the vehicle chassis is.

Currently IC engines are still king, but we are branching out... still not sure which way we're gonna go. Are we really going full electric? Or perhaps hydrogen fuel cell? Or who knows what else. This is another reason why I think it's important for cars of the future to be more customizable.

[Dicknose]

Putting a 10k kit on a 2k junker and having to do it yourself.
I'd hate to guess the resale value of that car, might be 5k.
Who wants to invest that much money on an old car, where the interior is worn.
I know people do engine replacements on older cars, but mostly for a similar engine that's cheap.
If someone put in a new fancy engine in an old car, where the engine cost many times the car, you would think they were crazy.

[Godson]

They do it all the time with hotrods and other designs...

[thesameguy]

Putting a 10k kit on a 2k junker and having to do it yourself.

Someone who is investing in an "open source vehicle" is probably not opposed to doing it themself. And, like other open source projects I would imagine enterprises will spring up to do the heavy lifting, just like with Android phones manufacturers and Redhat Linux consultants.

I'd hate to guess the resale value of that car, might be 5k.

So you'd lose $7k, maybe? Care to take a stab at what sort of depreciation was-new, now three year old car looks like?

Who wants to invest that much money on an old car, where the interior is worn.

Why not just find one that doesn't have a worn interior? That would be my advice.

If someone put in a new fancy engine in an old car, where the engine cost many times the car, you would think they were crazy.

I think you need to re-examine what people do to old cars and how much people put into their daily drivers just to keep them alive. I just put $4k into a Fiero. My neighbor put nearly that into a 2000-ish Avalon when the transmission puked.

[Godson]

I have almost equal invested into my M3 as what I spent to purchase it. But that is counting oil changes and odds and ends.

[Godson]

Hell, I spent more than half of what I paid for my Monsters on my 22,500 mile service.

[Dicknose]

I don't see how a single model of old junker woul do their aims of selectable options.
Sure you can do an engine swap, but you can do that now.

As for depreciation, I'm talking over capitalization.
You could put 10k worth of engine in and have it lose a lot of that value day 1
Sure a new car might drop 10% first day off the floor.
This is more like gold plating your new car and finding it's dropped 50% day one.

This OSV will be a tough sell.
Might be hard to get it complianced in some places, esp if they decide they need to crash test it in multiple configurations.
But it's a completely different concept to just putting hybrid engines in old cars.
If they can sell extra engines to that market that would help.
But clearly they are aiming for a much bigger concept.

[MR2 Fan]

I think an electric engine and battery setup into old honda civics would be good...light cars, already known for their easy swap ability.

There's an electric MR2 on youtube, I'll link to it later. What's interesting is they retained the 5 speed transmission somehow, but I don't understand how that would work on an electric motor

[Godson]

A guy did that with an S2000 also. Maintained the stock 6 speed. Tachometer even worked.

[Godson]

http://electrichonda.blogspot.com/


Another one of more insane levels...



Here is the one that maintained the stock transmission.

http://s2kev.blogspot.com/