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Transportation Open Source

Local Motors Looks To Disrupt the Auto Industry With 3D-Printed Car Bodies 128

Posted by Soulskill from the you-wouldn't-download-a-car? dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Local Motors solicits design ideas through crowdsourcing, allows anyone to use open source software to contribute ideas, and then 3D prints car bodies according to the chosen specs in a matter of days. To prove they mean business, Local Motors 3D-printed a car on the floor of the Detroit Auto Show last week. "It took 44 hours to print the Strati’s 212 layers. Once 3D printing is complete, the Strati moves to a Thermwood CNC router—a computer-controlled cutting machine that mills the finer details—before undergoing the final assembly process, which adds the drivetrain, electrical components, wiring, tires, gauges, and a showroom-ready paint job."

Here's another big difference from the current auto industry: "Customers can also bring their vehicles in at any time for hardware and software upgrades, or they can choose to melt their vehicle down and, for instance, add a seat. Because Local Motors uses a distributed manufacturing system to make only what is purchased, it doesn't stock inventory. Anyone can come into a Local Motors microfactory, use its design lab, and work on a vehicle project free of charge."
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Local Motors Looks To Disrupt the Auto Industry With 3D-Printed Car Bodies More

Local Motors Looks To Disrupt the Auto Industry With 3D-Printed Car Bodies

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  • Sitting outside was the hopper full of plastics... (Score:4, Funny)

    by postbigbang ( 761081 ) on Friday January 23, 2015 @02:12PM (#48886959)

    So that the car could be made in the living room.

    Everyone forgot the size of the door....

  • Crash-testing & strength? (Score:3)

    by RogL ( 608926 ) on Friday January 23, 2015 @02:25PM (#48887099)

    That's awesome, but how does that relate to crash-testing & safety standards?
    Are these such low-volume the normal regulations don't apply?

    Do they embed reinforcements or print around a base frame?

    Sounds like an awesome concept, but so many questions...

    • That's awesome, but how does that relate to crash-testing & safety standards? Are these such low-volume the normal regulations don't apply?

      Do they embed reinforcements or print around a base frame?

      Sounds like an awesome concept, but so many questions...

      Summary says car bodies, so these are essentially kit cars.

      • Summary says car bodies, so these are essentially kit cars.

        As such they'd be registered here on a "Q" plate and be subject to additional checks during the annual mandatory Ministry Of Transport inspection. Because the design is a one-off, then there is no "type" which could have been approved, so before receiving a registration mark that would allow it to be driven on the public highway (and incidentally, to be taxed), it would need to be inspected by a government-approved inspector to determine if it is sa

    • Re:Crash-testing & strength? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Lab Rat Jason ( 2495638 ) on Friday January 23, 2015 @02:35PM (#48887215)

      I agree completely... I don't know what percentage of time is spent engineering the safety of a car... and I know it's super cool and kitchey to "design your own car" and "3D print it" and stuff, but what happens when someone prints a car that is aerodynamically unstable at 80mph?

      "My test drives were all fine... but once I decided to open it up on a country road, I lost control and hit a horse drawn carriage full of people."

      There are reasons it takes millions and years to get a car roadworthy.

      Also, who's gonna handle the recalls if you share your design with someone else?

      • I'm sure this happens already, as kids often add absurd fins and wings to production cars, and then drive the modified abominations on public roads. But apparently I've been OK with this for my whole life, so I have no reason to worry about what will essentially be more of the same.

      • Re:Crash-testing & strength? (Score:5, Funny)

        by ArcadeMan ( 2766669 ) on Friday January 23, 2015 @03:17PM (#48887597)

        "My test drives were all fine... but once I decided to open it up on a country road, I lost control and hit a horse drawn carriage full of people."

        That means you went over 88mph.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by aitikin ( 909209 )
        FTA (yes I know, this is slashdot, and someone actually RTFA, unbelievable) they already succeeded in exceeding expectations and destroying the long expected timeframe with a project for DARPA:

        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 vehic

    • Most of the plastics used in 3d printing are high strength.

      Remember, you can print a gun now - so it is roughly equivelent to metal.

      You may have to make certain arts slightly thicker, but I don't see any problem with crash-testing and safety standards.

      What I do see a problem is COST. Usually 3d printing is very expensive when compared to mass produced. Not only are materials more expensive, but the time of the 3d printer is worth money. It takes time and effort to 3d print, rather than pour stuff i

      • Plastic is not as hard as metal. The 3D printed guns have to be built much beefier, and even at the increased size of them, they still only last for 10's of shots, not hundreds or thousands like a regular gun. If you 3D printer a gun, you probably shouldn't fire it with your hand, as you are at risk losing some fingers.

        That being said, I also question the cost and feasibility of this. 3D printing is great for 1-off prototypes, but it's a stupid idea for mass production. Even the best 3D printers are sl
      • Crash testing is more than strength. Your vehicle has to crumple properly or your nice, sturdy dashboard and windshield will be just fine and dandy with little bits of crushed driver scattered all over them. Or your airbag will bounce the front passenger's head into the passenger side pillar hard enough to crack a skull. Or the front of your hood will pop up at a 30 degree angle and decapitate the occupants of the vehicle you hit.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

      There is a specialty vehicle clause that covers super low production cars. That is why you can go to a shop and buy a 32 Duce coup Hot Rod that used no parts from a 32 Ford Duce coup and probably has a small block chevy in it. No crash testing and no emissions testing... That is why they use a small bock chevy or some other classic engine. They make the emissions date of the car be the date of the engine so for a SBC they can put something like 1962. Same thing goes for kit cars and so on.
      But the truth be

    • I think designing and printing whole car bodies is only ever going to be niche industry; to most people, a car is just a set of wheels to take them to and from work. But I can see a much more interesting application of this: printing out spares that are otherwise ridiculously expensive to buy. It might help break the car industry's stranglehold on their customers - that would be very welcome, IMO.

    • I would assume that they are talking about printing them with fiber reinforced plastic, not the plastic you would use in a RepRap. Fiber reinforced plastic can be extremely strong. If they have figured out a way to insert the fibers as the plastic is printed that would open up a lot of possibilities for creating crumple zones in the plastic.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday January 23, 2015 @02:26PM (#48887109)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Yes, the full article incorrectly reported:

      "Depending on the options chosen by the buyer, the Strati will retail between $18,000 and $30,000, and it is expected to be highway-ready in the next year."

      When we asked Local Motors about crash performance at NAIAS this year, they confirmed that these vehicles aren't going to be usable on public roads. Neat idea, but very very far from being a game changer....

      • I've looked into bringing a car from Mexico to the US. Latin America has lots of models that aren't available in the US, such as the Ford Ka. Unfortunately, US safety standards thoroughly "cock block" that idea. It can be done, but it's not worth doing. A car made to Mexican safety standards, such as they are, I think can be driven in the US by Mexican owners, but can't be simply bought and driven by US citizens. A US citizen can't pop down to Mexico, buy one of these cars and just drive it back to the

        • Re:NHTSA Safety standards cock-blocks the idea (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Firethorn ( 177587 ) on Friday January 23, 2015 @07:14PM (#48889761) Homepage Journal

          The big exception to safety standards is the antique car.

          I'll add one more: The kit car. So long as it's assembled by the owner himself(though he can subsequently sell it intact, it's a bit like selling home-made firearms), it's not considered 'manufactured' and not subject to a lot of the rules.

          If they can arrange it so the buyer is 'assembling' the car(even if that means the paperwork says he's renting the machine and buying only the feedstock/parts) as a legal fiction, they can dodge a lot of rules.

    • I would presume scooters and motorcycles have way easier standards to meet since they don't have to do anything to protect the rider - I wonder if it would make more sense to start by producing those. Custom scooter/motorcycle designs could be pretty cool.

  • In reality all this lets you do is reskin a standard car with any sort of body that you want, but under the hood it is still the same as every other car. Which is probably still a good thing - otherwise maintenance becomes a nightmare.

    • The body is way more than a skin around everything else. The body IS the structure of the car. They don't have frames anymore. The body provides the stiffness for everything. Drive train components anchor to it. The body provides crash protection as the structure crumples to absorb energy.

      I'm not saying it is impossible, but the body is a way more complicated structure than most folks think. A car body isn't just a style statement. Many of the shapes we see over and over in cars are there for rigidi

  • Disruption? (Score:3)

    by bws111 ( 1216812 ) on Friday January 23, 2015 @02:27PM (#48887121)

    Yeah, I'll bet the auto manufacturers are really losing sleep over this 'disruption'. Gee, they can print out a body in only 44 hours - what's it take a real manufacturer, 2 seconds? And how does a car that 'anybody' can design even begin to meet safety standards? Or are safety standards just another 'regulatory capture'?

    • I know. People need to stop using the term "disruption." They don't know what it means and aren't using it correctly. Just stop.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gnupun ( 752725 )

      How about minor repairs? Will we need to pay hundreds of dollars to buff out some scratch or repair deep dents when we can instead replace the damaged outer panel with a new 3D printed one. Of course, cars need to be redesigned to handle such swapping.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by bws111 ( 1216812 )

        The hundreds of dollars is usually mostly made up of the cost of making it look good - sanding, painting, etc. Unless these cars are going to be just raw material, with no finish (not even UV protection), they will have the same issues. And if they are going to be just raw materials with no finish, yuck.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gnupun ( 752725 )

          Of course they'll have a decent finish and UV protection. Except they'll probably be mass manufactured in some cheap country by robots where they don't charge $50/hour, so it'll be 1/10th the cost of having in repaired by an auto body shop.

  • Can you actually drive it? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by OzPeter ( 195038 ) on Friday January 23, 2015 @02:27PM (#48887123)

    First of all FFS put a link to the actual company in the the summary, and don;t just link to a blog talking about it. How hard is that to do? Local Motors [localmotors.com]

    Ok .. its a 3d printed body of a car that slips onto a pre-built electric car chassis (from Renault according to their FAQ). But the big question I have is about this statement in the FAQ:

    Does it drive?
    Hell yeah. Once the 3D-printed car is cleared by U.S. vehicle rules and regulations, it will be drivable on public roads; our goal is to complete this in 2015.

    What I don't know about US car regulations is what is needed to certify a car as being able to drive on the road. The classic manufacturers basically get a particular model certified and then stamp out millions that conform to that, and have QA departments that verify what they produce is what the expect to be producing.

    But in this case the car is effectively being made from scratch each time on a small jobbing basis. So does that mean that every instance of one of theses cars needs to be certified on a per car basis?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Custom built cars have only need to meet particular set of standards. If you can get the tag you are usually fine. Getting the tag in no way means NHTSA certified. It usually means you have particular things in your car. For example 2 break/head/color lights, particular types of breaks, wheels are covered, muffler if it is ICE, etc. You car could be a total disaster in a crash yet you can still drive it on the road.

      There are particular safety things they do enforce (must have seat belts and possibly ai

  • Bre Petis (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Jodka ( 520060 ) on Friday January 23, 2015 @02:33PM (#48887181)

    Local Motors is an investment of Bre Petis, of Makerbot fame, as noted on his web page. [brepettis.com]

    I don't know if it is deliberate viral marketing strategy of his or just good investment instinct, but I have noticed that products which make headlines on tech sites trace back to his investments. Another example is the new LIDAR [wikipedia.org] offered at SparkFun [sparkfun.com] from PulsedLight, which, according to this [youtube.com] YouTube video, is linked to DragonInnovation.com, another Petis investment.

  • So will the Tesla-haters (other than the self-serving parasites Elon has made obsolete) like this, or hate it even more?

    If only I could think of a car analogy to help me decide!

  • An modern auto plant turns out a vehicle approximately once every minute. These vehicles tax 44 hours per unit. The US alone purchases 16M vehicles/year. How will this ever be competitive?

    Of course if one reads the article, they are mainly looking at this for prototyping vehicles, particularly military ones, but not the actual production of vehicles. So in short, this is about using 3D printing to prototype something before going to full production. Haven't we been doing that since the 1970s?

    • 44 hours per unit isn't comparable to a car factory. How much footprint does the 3D printer take up, and how many of those can fit in the footprint of a car factory? I'm sure you'll get it down to a minute if you can put 2640 of them in the building. What you are saying is that it takes thousands of man-hours to make a car, how is that every going to be competitive?

    • An modern auto plant turns out a vehicle approximately once every minute.

      A car might roll off the line every 60 seconds, but each individual car takes ~20 hours to make. And that only works because they are all the same with only superficial differences.

      So in short, this is about using 3D printing to prototype something before going to full production. Haven't we been doing that since the 1970s?

      No, because 3D printers weren't developed until the 80s. :)
      =Smidge=

  • If you think Tesla ruffled some feathers by promoting direct to consumer selling, wait until this takes off. ( if ever )

    Car manufacturers will have KITTENS once they realize their parts department becomes irrelevant when any third party business can now print compatible parts out for a fraction of what the dealerships charge for them. Things like doors, body panels, and the like.

    I wonder how long it would take for them to introduce some sort of DRM model into vehicle parts . .. . . lol

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bws111 ( 1216812 )

      You don't really think that the dealer is the only place to buy replacement parts, do you?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Scoth ( 879800 )

        It depends on the part and the popularity of the model. For things like Mustangs, Camaros, Firebirds, etc there's lots of aftermarket options for all sorts of things. Fenders, door panels, door skins, bumper covers... you could probably build a whole vintage Mustang from the frame up with non-Ford-OEM parts. Likewise with parts that are widely shared across models and are generally considered consumable - brake pads, clutches, alternators, etc. Readily available third party. On the other hand, if you need s

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by bws111 ( 1216812 )

          My point was that all of the common parts (ie the ones that you can actually make money selling) are already available from third parties. No auto manufacturer is getting rich selling climate control sliders or even climate control heads. Yes, those parts may be expensive to buy, but that does not mean they are some sort of cash cow for the manufacturer like the OP seems to think. I suspect that the manufacturers wouldn't carry those parts at all if they could avoid it, because they are money losers.

    • It depends how they are sold If they are sold like kit cars and meant to be assembled by the end user, then there's a lot of regulations that you can get around. kit cars have very relaxed rules on what is required it make the street legal in many states. If you can get a frame from the 50's or earlier, you basically can avoid all regulations, as long as you have approved tires.

    • The only thing 3D printed on this vehicle was the body. None of the running gear (you know, the parts that usually break) were printed.

  • Take this NADA (Score:3)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Friday January 23, 2015 @02:53PM (#48887393) Journal
    Since the buyers technically "make" their own cars, they would be treated more like the kit-car [*] and hobbyists of the past. The NADA had ignored that segment till now and there is lots of precedents for selling kits without going through the auto dealers.

    [*] Sorry if you got Macgyver theme song running in your head.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by OzPeter ( 195038 )

      [*] Sorry if you got Macgyver theme song running in your head.

      After SNL, I always think about McGruber now.

  • What struck me as the most interesting part of this article was the concept of taking your car to the shop, removing the drive train, and melting the rest down to be used to print a new car.

    This would be fantastic. All of a sudden, getting into a crash doesn't mean you have to junk the whole car. You can salvage the body and a lot of the parts (in theory). Wait a week or two and voila, you have a brand new product.

    In theory we should be doing this with existing cars, but they just don't seem to be built for

    • getting into a crash doesn't mean you have to junk the whole car. You can salvage the body and a lot of the parts (in theory). [...] In theory we should be doing this with existing cars, but they just don't seem to be built for it,

      The labor involved in disassembling and assembling cars is substantial. But even so, when you "junk" a car, they don't just crush it. Most of the parts are removed from the vehicle first, and sold on or scrapped separately. The body is crushed and made into more cars, or into home appliances, or whatever. And now we're moving towards Aluminum unibodies, which are even more recyclable than steel. They're also more repairable, because of the way they're put together, but the cost is still prohibitive so it's

      • Good to know. Where I live (semi-rural area) there's probably a half dozen junk yards within a 15 minute drive of me. Cars just go there and... sit around... Sometimes people will run in there and yank a part out for nominal amounts of money, but most of the time they just sit and rust away.

        • . Where I live (semi-rural area) there's probably a half dozen junk yards within a 15 minute drive of me. Cars just go there and... sit around... Sometimes people will run in there and yank a part out for nominal amounts of money, but most of the time they just sit and rust away.

          It's highly unusual any more for a junkyard not to have at least part of their inventory on the internet, even bumpkin ma and pa junkyards are networked now. There's sites that let you enter your inventory and which handle relaying sales inquiries. So they don't have webpages, but you can contact them via the web.

    • All of a sudden, getting into a crash doesn't mean you have to junk the whole car. You can salvage the body and a lot of the parts (in theory). Wait a week or two and voila, you have a brand new product.

      In theory we should be doing this with existing cars, but they just don't seem to be built for it

      No, instead they're built in a way that dissipates the energy so you survive the crash. Yes the car is totalled but you stand a higher chance of walking away from the accident. You seem to want to reverse the advances there have been in crash protection.

  • 3D printing is great for small volume items that you don't want to stock or are customized each time.
    They are not so good for high volume parts. This may make an interesting custom body building option, but a Toyota replacement it is not. The article seemed to imply that the body itself was $10,000+. For a mass car manufacturer the body is $1,000, painted (material, energy and direct labour). The other issue is the properties of material that can be used. Can a 3d printer use galvanized steel? Or make

  • No. Lookit, printing a car body in 44 hours is a joke. Any auto plant in the world can probably turn out a thousand or so a day.

    If anything this might be disruptive to MAACO or some other body shop -- dent up your fusion, and they can print out a replacement panel in a day or two.

    3d printing is cool, but right now (and probably forever) it's just hype.

    • No factory in the world can custom build you a car body in 44 hours based on a design you just finished.

      • And that lack of capability is 'disruptive' or threatening to their business model somehow?

        I'm not taking exception to what they're doing, nor discounting the 'cool' factor -- but to claim it's DISRUPTIVE to the auto industry is silly.

        • but to claim it's DISRUPTIVE to the auto industry is silly.

          Indeed. 'Disruptive' would be Tesla coming out with a hatchback EV with a 300 mile range for under $20k (just to make it wildly disruptive).

          Worst case this displaces some kit car builds, and the likely result is that the prototyping departments are already buying the printers for the major manufacturers to purchase themselves.

  • People have been designing their own car bodies for many decades. They are called hot rods. Very few regulations apply. 3D printing is capable of creating radically strong structures. It is simply due to the fact that they easily do what machining finds next to impossible and on top of that there need be no seams or joints to fail. Compare the thin walls of a plastci milk jug to metal of the same thickness and that plastic is quite strong, lite weight, and free of rust or corrosion iss
  • Motor - 5 bhp, 62-mile range, Top Speed - approx. 50mph*

    Not quite the definition of 'car', 3D printed or no.
  • Not interested. I prefer to have cars with proven crash safety features, cars that meet Euro nCAP 5 star rating. Somehow I doubt these would meet even 1 star ratings.

  • The only part of the automaking process that they changed was body/chassis assembly. That part is already highly automated, with robots doing most of the work. Yay, so you get all the automation, with the addition of greater customization. However, the vast majority of the labor is in assembly of the rest of the car. And if every car off the line is different, a lot of the efficiencies you get with the moving assembly line go completely out the window.

  • Being an old fart; I remember when finding after market parts for vehicles more than a few years old was easy. Then it became fashionable in the 1990s to have a quarterly inventory tax (implemented by many states). Having a recurring inventory tax made it prohibitively expensive to keep ready stocks of repair parts. Even the utility industry went to "just in time" ordering as they were being taxed on their warehouses full of spare pumps, motors, valves.

    3D printing looks like an easy way

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