What can We Learn from OScar?

It always starts quite innocently. You go to a conference; you realize that the subject matter of the talk is hopelessly outdated for you, fall into a familiar state of seminar consciousness and the light bulb goes off. Your idea is going to be the next best thing.

That's what happened to Markus Merz, formerly of BMW. In his words, "his idea will redefine mobility, it will be something tangible, real, created somewhere between your computer and your garage". Something built "with each other and not against each other", as the Internet would allow.

He articulated his vision in a manifesto on November 1999:

• the birth - how he came up with the concept
• the goal - a concept for a vehicle free from barriers and competition
• the way - some ambitious time lines
• the tools - brains, hardware, and faith in ingenuity and inventiveness
• the community - no boss, no hierarchies, none of that stuff "that is believed to be important"

Merz built a web to host 4 main forums moderated by experts on separate areas of the concept:

1.   integration of all design, concept, package and distribution requirements;

2.   modules for the power systems of the car, including safety and information;

3.   tools for communications, project management, simulation and technical assistance for Open Source hardware; [note that the site was built using Joomla! software]

4.   network to capture help needed requests, match scientific and corporate partners and capture legal aspects like licenses, warranties, etc.

So far, so good. So what is OScar's (for Open Source car) biggest challenge? For one, it might be difficult to find someone who will want to build the car. Creation in an open-source environment is just the beginning.

There are many initiatives today that hover at the edges of the economic engine established in the past. While OScar is a project, I wonder if, married to a set of guidelines or core competencies identified by Tim O'Reilly in an article published a little over one year ago for Web 2.0 companies, it might become a company -- even if only to realize on the scope of its mission, to make a car. Let's take a look at those core competencies, as defined by O'Reilly:

• Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
• Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
• Trusting users as co-developers
• Harnessing collective intelligence
• Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
• Software above the level of a single device
• Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

What do you think? Can we learn from OScar?

Comments

[gianandrea facchini]

valeria, i used to work for the first launch of the smart in italy, back on 1998. the car came with a rather similar concept ( well the software was different at that time) and with a strong focus on customer. you may build your car at a computer installed in the sale shop, place the order and get your tailor made car in three days.
even if the world changed a lot since then, i believe that a project as it was the smart one and as it is oscar is too far complex to get someone to produce it. you may actually find it only on a very small scale, local delivery (probably europe is ok) but at a very high cost. these were the reason why the first smart project failed and there are the reason why oscar may not succeed. by the way the timing of the two projects is very similar and it was a very trendy topic for the time. hope i get the point. ciao.

[Valeria Maltoni]

Gianandrea:

The Smart is one of my favorite cars. I suspect that the initial project was modeled after the parent brand Swatch and the many ways/flavors in which they're producing watches.

Building a custom car is not the same as building a relatively custom watch though and I can see why the project failed.

What's interesting to me is that OScar still seems to be at the conceptual phase. I favor prototyping and going to market with iterative models.

[gianandrea facchini]

correct, valeria. the first smart was a culture clash between swatch, willing to make a toy car, and mercedes, willing to make a tech car. the result was an hybrid too expensive and too far in some solution that just did not work. today smart is rather successful in some part of italy, eg rome. but it is defintely driven by rather dumb people: they feel the car is easy to drive and small to pass in narrow places. the result is horrible crash.