revolution—one that takes advantage of technological advances like additive manufacturing and open-source software for a faster iteration process: “We’re trying to change the economics of the auto industry—we call it an economy of scope instead of an economy of scale. For 100 years, the auto industry has been supply-driven, where customers choose from the available inventory. We’re changing it to be demand-driven.”
Over the next 10 years, Local Motors plans to build 100 microfactories around the world, includingmetro Detroit. At NAIAS, the company announced its latest microfactory locations at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Knoxville, TN, and in Washington, DC.
“Everyone at Local Motors, and the participants in our global co-creation community, feel like we’ve played a role in catalyzing the disruption of 100 years of manufacturing vehicles the same way,” Fishkin says. “We hope that people around the world will join us by participating in the design of vehicle solutions of their own. The localization of vehicle manufacturing will create jobs and empower communities to run on locally generated fuels of their choice. This isn’t just exciting, it’s game-changing.”
That remains to be proven, but for now President Obama seems to agree. In 2011, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) approached Local Motors with a challenge: Design a combat support vehicle for use in Afghanistan more cheaply and quickly. Local Motors solicited design ideas on its website, chose the best out of the 162 that it received, and built and delivered the vehicle, called the XC2V, in four months– a timeframe considered impossibly fast.
The XC2V proved that crowdsourcing and co-creation can increase innovation and efficiency. During his remarks at its unveiling at Carnegie Mellon University, Obama said, “Not only could this change the way the government uses your tax dollars—because think about it, instead of having a 10-year lead time to develop a piece of equipment with all kinds of changing specs and a moving target, if we were able to collapse the pace at which that manufacturing takes place, that could save taxpayers billions of dollars. But it also could get products out to theater faster, which could save lives more quickly, and could then be used to transfer into the private sector more rapidly, which means we could get better products and services that we can sell and export around the world.”
