Open Source Car/Vehicle Design Manufacture

I have just been reading about the various Open Source Car Design groups and am very excited about the implications of such groups. Back in 2003 to 2005 I was doing my dissertation on Electric Vehicles and reading everything I could about them only to find that all the mini home build projects and some of the bigger ones like the Solectra had died a death or had simply vanished a couple of months later.

Due to budget on a University Disseratation, for which I spent £50 on a 250 watt electric mobility scooter that had controller issues from ingress of water plus many hours trying to get things working, I finally did build a skeleton of an electric motor bike that on the rolling road test bed (no insurance to take it out in the car park) that did carry 160kg at 30mph quite happily. Although I did not get to discover the endurance of this bike it is note worthy to say that the batteries were not charged at any stage during the two years of build and rolling road testing... I guess I was not pushing the boundaries hard enough.

Back to the projects of interest:

RiverSimple
OScar
OSGV Open Source Green Vehicle
c,mm,n - common (Netherlands)

Where RiverSimple seems to be the winner in the running with progression.

Matthew John Ritchie