Electric Open Source-Style Designed Car

Well, for starters, they got the title right. 'Building a Car, Open Source-Style' doesn't make the mistake of saying 'Open Source car. It does follow the concepts of Open Source:

...Markus Merz believes they can. The young German is the founder and "maintainer" (that's the title on his business card) of the OScar project, whose goal is to develop and build a car according to open-source (OS) principles. Merz and his team aren't going for a super-accessorized SUV—they're aiming at designing a simple and functionally smart car. And, possibly, along the way, reinvent transportation. After all, "Form follows function", says Merz.

The OScar is not the only open-source hardware project out there. Others include Zero Prestige, which designs kites and kite-powered vehicles, and Open Prosthetics, which offers free exchange of designs for prosthetic devices. However, OScar is certainly the most ambitious....

In going to the OScar site, I took a look at the idea:

The idea behind the OScar project is simple: A community of people plans and develops a new car in the web. The idea is about the goal to develop a simple and innovative car, but also about the way how this goal is achieved. We would like to convey the idea of Open Source to “hardware” and we want OScar to be the precursor for many different projects in this field. If you are interested in how the idea was formed, read the manifesto of 1999.

The manifesto is available as a bite-sized PDF filehere in a variety of languages.

Pretty cool. And the concept has an electric drivetrain. Cool. :-)