• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 796 0

its car. It’s hard to imagine something more children’s museum-like than a company enticing adults to color cars. But more than 9,000 people submitted their designs in only a few days. What that tells me is not just that they love their BMWs but that they would love BMWs that looked unique—BMWs that expressed their muses as well as their libidos. What an opportunity the industry has to bring humanity and personality back to cars. If so many of us like to express ourselves in blogs; YouTube videos; Facebook, Bebo, and MySpace pages; and Flickr photos—if, as Google understands, many of us want to have a strong identity online through self-expression—why wouldn’t we want to express ourselves through our cars? Companies have turned their products into commodities by imposing such sameness on them. I know, it’s about efficiency—four lines of cars built under four brands on the same body with the same engine and parts makes them cost-effective. Factory efficiency and dealer economics also stop us from ordering custom-made cars anymore. We buy off the lot, not out of the factory, and we buy cars that are often loaded—like cable subscriptions—with things we don’t want. (Every time I start my car, I turn off the night-vision rearview mirror, a $100-plus option I didn’t want but had to buy.) Sure, there’s an aftermarket for options—piney scent strips, hubcaps that spin, mud flaps with mirrors in the shape of naked women—but, well, that’s just not me.

Toyota’s Scion took a small step toward personalization when it enabled drivers to design crests for their cars. Now go the next step and imagine I could take an unpainted car to any of those BMW designers on Facebook or my student the graffiti artist and have my car painted so that it looks like no other. It’ll cost me. But I’ll bond with that car and love it because it’s an expression of me.

That unpainted car would be the beginning of an auto company thinking open-source. What if the company also produced a car onto which I could graft someone else’s dashboard or seats or grill or engine? Earlier, I talked about Google replacing its fleet of company cars with Toyota Prius hybrids that were modified so their extra batteries could be recharged with solar power. That is the Googlemobile. Google treated the Prius as a platform. Toyota should be delighted. It should build in opportunities to modify its car in countless ways. I can hear the objections: It could complicate production, raise costs, and confuse brands. Maybe. But it could give me the car I want. The car company of the future should be a platform for more car companies that make the automobiles drivers want, not the ones they settle for.

There are projects aimed at building the open-source car, among them Oscar from Germany, the c,mm,n (or common) hydrogen car from universities in the Netherlands, and the Society for Sustainable Mobility car (being built with 150 part-time engineers, according to Fast Company). The Aptera from Bill Gross’ IdeaLab (more from him later, in the chapter, “Google Capital”) is a beautiful, three-wheeled hybrid or electric vehicle set to launch in California. Tesla Motors is building a six-figure-plus all-electric sports car with funding from one of PayPal’s founders. They are all cool and I wish them luck. But it’s damned difficult to get a car company operating at scale—ask John DeLorean.

That is why I think a car company that already operates at scale should think open-source and welcome these nascent efforts to build atop them. Imagine seeing a million Priuses, Saturns, Fords, or Apteras on the road and wondering what’s inside each, what makes it run, who painted it, where you can get that great grill. Imagine being given the power to customize your car from the ground up. Cars would be exciting again. Give me control of my car and I will own that brand, make that brand, love that brand, and sell that brand because it is mine, not yours. That will be the key to marketing Googlemobiles: passion, individuality, creation, choice, excitement, newness. Drivers will start Facebook groups, blogs,