Local Motors
challenges presented to collaborators.
Contributors also can qualify for royalties from vehicles that actually go to market and incorporate their concepts.
Local Motors also offers manufacturing space and tools for contributors who want to try their hand at making some of the components they design and bring the products to life.
The company has attracted more than $40 million in investments since 2007 and isn’t currently looking for more. “We are well capitalized,” Rogers said.
The company has raised the capital from 45 corporations and individuals, including four Harvard instructors familiar with Rogers’ work during his MBA.
The company has about 96 employees, with 82 of them in Chandler.
The Rally Fighter
The Rally Fighter, which has drawn most of the attention at Local Motors, was a collaboration where designers submitted ideas online and voted for their favorite.
“It’s the first crowd-sourced vehicle ever made,” Chief Financial Officer Jean Paul Capin said.
Rogers began manufacturing the vehicle after moving his company to Chandler in 2010 from Massachusetts. It cost just $3.2 million to develop the vehicle, and the company needed to sell 82 of them to break even. “We’ve already done that,” Capin said. The company plans to make only 2,000 of the vehicles.
During a recent tour of the plant, two Local Motors workers hovered around a single Rally Fighter in production.
A large dirt jump in the rear parking lot is well-worn from employees taking the vehicles for hot laps.
U.S. customers who buy the Rally Fighter, because of laws regarding vehicle certification, must assemble more than half the vehicle themselves, making the product a bit of a specialty.
Local Motors offers building assistance from its own mechanics. The purchase includes catered meals and hotel accommodations for the six days required to put one of the kits together.
Customers also can buy a Rally Fighter in a Box for $20,000 and put it together themselves at home with instructions that Local Motors makes public.
Although the sales of Rally Fighters might be complicated, the important thing for the company was that a vehicle designed collaboratively online could ever wind up in consumers’ hands, and quickly.
Developing the car wasn’t pain-free, but the collaborative process withstood setbacks that would have delayed major auto manufacturers for years.
For example, the car uses a pre-packaged engine from General Motors, the LS3 ERod, a 6.2-liter V8 used in Corvettes and Camaros. But the engine the vehicle was built around changed twice during the development process, from Mercedes to BMW and finally GM.
“That’s never been done, and we still got to market in12 months,” Rogers said.
Another product the company makes, the Verrado Electric “drift trike,” was a concept that just happened to hit upon a popular pastime of engineers, who would slip PVC tubing over the wheels of tricycles to better fishtail while speeding downhill.
A Kickstarter campaign for the Verrado was so successful, raising nearly $50,000, that the company put it into full production.
The $1,600 model has an electric motor, so no pedaling or hill is needed. Local Motors also offers a $600 “gravity model” without the motor for those who live near a hill. tors executives and investors that small quantities of vehicles can be developed and manufactured at a low cost, and the company is doubling down on that concept with 3-D printing a vehicle.
In September, during the International Manufacturing Technology Show in Chicago, the company and partners including Oak Ridge National Laboratory, “printed” a small vehicle body with a Big Area Additive Manufacturing (BAAM) machine made by Cincinnati Inc.
The BAAM machine is essentially the same as a desktop 3-D printer, but much larger, and the plastic used for the Strati was reinforced with carbon fiber.
The black vehicle frame was printed in layers about as thick as a finger, and had the appearance of being molded by clay rolled into long snakelike strands and stacked atop each other. Routers can smooth out the layered appearance of vehicles made with direct digital manufacturing.
The car uses an electric drivetrain and was printed in 44 hours. Because it boasts only 45 parts, the entire vehicle was assembled at the show and driven around the exhibition hall.
For now, there’s only one Strati, but Local Motors hopes to sell the car commercially within a year. And, unlike the Rally Fighter, buyers won’t have to assemble any part of the vehicle themselves, Capin said.
The ability to design a vehicle and print it on the spot represents “oneclick” vehicle design, Rogers said. Local Motors might not go on to sell thousands of Stratis in particular, but being able to design and print a car on the spot holds significant promise, he said.
“Whatever vehicles we build from that will come out a lot faster because we can change them on the fly,” he said. “If we can get the printing time below 20 hours or 12 hours, the potential for what it means is just revolutionary.”
The ability to quickly design vehicles with direct digital manufacturing leads to the rationale of having dozens of microfactories around the country. Traditional automakers face enormous expenses in preparing factories intended to produce tens of thousands of vehicles, all without knowing exactly how well a particular model might sell. Local Motors can be much more nimble, reacting to smaller, regional niche markets.
“Local demand can dictate what the microfactories produce,” Rogers said.
For example, microfactories can make weather-specific vehicles such as all-wheel-drive for snowy locations. Or take advantage of fuel sources that are more abundant in certain areas.
“Let’s do one in Puerto Rico where the demand is small but cane-based ethanol is the fuel of choice,” Rogers said. FirstBuild community are protected with a Creative Commons license that protects the copyright on the work but allows it to be copied into other designs with proper credit.
“We’ve proved we can do it with appliances,” Rogers said. “Maybe firearms or homebuilding will be next. Anytime you are building a complex device is a great opportunity to do that.”
One garbage-disposal concept developed through the collaborative community involves a button on the counter that, when tapped twice, automatically turns on the faucet and runs the disposal until the material in it is ground up and washed away. The design avoids the need to switch on the water and hit an electric switch to operate a disposal.
“Disposers are dumb; they haven’t been innovated in years,” Rogers said. “Emerson Electric (which dominates the disposal market) over 30 years didn’t care to bring that innovation out.”
Other partnerships have included the Department of Energy and Peterbilt Trucks.
Rogers said he hopes such partnerships eventually represent 20 percent of company revenue.
For obvious reasons, Local Motors partners only with companies that are not competitors. However, Rogers said he has given tours to major auto manufacturers.
“Their lawyers and executives leave with smiles because they think we will never compete with (them) because we are too small,” he said. “We are a technology company that designs, builds and sells vehicles. They are industrial companies that build and sell vehicles.”
It’s hard to say if opening 50 or more microfactories around the country, as Local Motors hopes, would change that.
“I’m not ignorant,” Rogers said. “If we are eating their bread and butter, they are going to come after us.”