Open Motors
= "Open Motors’ (formerly OSVehicle) mission is to democratize mobility by enabling businesses and startups to design, prototype, and build custom electric vehicles and transportation services".
URL = https://www.openmotors.co/
Description
1. By Yuki Liu:
"Open Motors (formerly OSVehicle) is a B2B company that provides ready-to-use hardware platforms and modular self-driving electric vehicles in white label to enable companies to produce custom fleet vehicles in half the time and ⅙ the cost.
MISSION: Open Motors' mission is to accelerate Mobility as a Service (MaaS)' transition to first profitability at scale with an open and sustainable approach.
This allows for the creation of a new economic system liberated from the old unsustainable petrolium ecosystem now in heavy decline.
IMPACT: Automotive environmental sustainability is one of the key aspects that Open Motors is advocating for, with light logistics, cradle to cradle design, overcoming planned obsolescence, distributed assembly, and partial fabrication. It also aims at socially sustainable production with a multistakeholder approach and an equitable value chain (with much higher profit distribution and the creation of more local jobs).
FUTURE PROOF: Open Motors' modular EV technologies allow the direct replacement and upgrading of outdated individual component, thus greatly increasing the product lifetime. The modular vehicles can be shipped in crates and assembled locally in a simple workshop/microfactory, lowering environmental impact, creating local jobs and drastically decreasing import taxes and assembly costs.
Thanks to Open Motors' neutrality, companies and governments can choose the most suitable solution for the storage, security, integrity, ownership granularity and monetization of data." (email August 2019)
2.
"In October 2013 the Hong Kong based company was founded and OSVehicle launched publicly for the first time during Maker Faire Europe, an event organized by Riccardo Luna, director of Wired Italy in 2008, and Massimo Banzi, founder of Arduino.
The team continued to grow with the involvement of Simone Cicero, influencer in Open Source Hardware and core connector of OuiShare, and Francesco Nepi, previously marketing director and worldwide sales manager for brands such as Aprilia and Piaggio as well as CEO of Oxygen.
Today OSVehicle has requests from over 80 countries, with hundreds of projects being started based on the open platform, which is freely downloadable from the website.
Projects on OSVehicle that have already been announced include BusyBee, the first road legal city car built on the open platform, FabCar, a vehicle showcased at Fab10 in Barcelona that can be built entirely inside a FabLab, SPA’s Luxury EV, from a historical Italian brand and made of new high-tech materials, Maker’s Car, vehicles created by makers with local materials such as fabric and wood, and NIKA, the first connected car made specifically to enable app development. Four new projects ranging from car-sharing to autonomous agricultural vehicles are being developed by the French Company Cluster Aquinetic.
Open Motors will continue to work on shipping improvements to its car platforms." (https://www.openmotors.co/company/)
3. Yuki Liu:
"Open Motors is introducing to the automotive industry a more open approach enabling the growth of startups and serial entrepreneurs to join the sector. The creation of an open framework as a chassis to build vehicles is possible, creating a true open ecosystem. That’s where TABBY EVO comes into play: free to use, and available to everyone. The TABBY EVO platform can be used to bootstrap new businesses creating their own vehicles, run services, tech development for education purposes, and much more. By using it they can save millions of dollars and years of R&D. All the plans and blueprints are downloadable for free from our website. They can improve and customize the designs, and upload them to share their ideas with the community through the ecosystem.
Despite its simplicity, TABBY EVO started a revolution, empowering entrepreneurs to start their own companies, brands and EVs.
The revenue generated by our sales, still in its test-market infancy, is not covering our investments yet. Open Motors is mainly self-funded and is still considered a pre-revenue company, currently working through the stage of product development and market validation." (email, September 2019)
Characteristics
Via Yuki Liu:
"UNIQUENESS:
- the lowest TCO (Total cost of ownership) thanks to the advanced modular technology of the entire vehicle based on an open architecture, including swappable batteries that allow a full energy charge in less than 5 minutes
- the lowest cost of infrastructure for swapping and charging stations (>10 times more efficient than BetterPlace, Tesla, NIO Swapping battery)
- hardware upgradeability for the most advanced technologies in Self-Driving, Connected Cars and Batteries giving every vehicle a 10 times lifespan over other cars
- advanced non-proprietary AI and data systems "
(email, August 2019)
How Open is Open Motors
Yuki Liu:
"We wanted to enable other companies to develop seamlessly integrating modules into an open and versatile fleet vehicle. How we are doing this?
1) We are bringing Open Data, Open Innovation, Open Source, and Open API into the automotive industry. We also rebranded to Open Motors from OSVehicle to highlight a more inclusive and less radical approach to these technologies.
2) By applying advanced modularity to our platforms, we are profoundly changing the relationship with the public, cities, ecosystem, and core business model in the auto industry. We are offering complete vehicles and battery technologies with easy repairability, refurbishment and hardware/software upgradeability. The main advantages are a longer lifetime of the product, a lower TCO (total cost of ownership) and recyclability, which can save up to 70% of logistics costs. On top of this, we can hack import taxes in many countries: in Nepal for instance, taxes go from 238% for a complete vehicle to 2-3% for components. It’s a huge saving, more than 230%! Then, our technologies can be easily assembled and maintained locally.
3) By taking a different approach from traditional auto OEMs and the big/giga factory model, we believe in distributed manufacturing and distributed assembly, relying on a consolidated network of manufacturers and distributors of car & electronic components in Europe, US and Asia, we developed during 30 years of direct supplier relationships and a top-level automotive engineering team from Italy.
4) By enabling co-creation and a participative approach to development and customization of the projects, the experimentation of new technical solutions and new paths to more sustainable fabrication are accelerated while massively reducing overall costs and logistics. Our platform is fully compatible with 3D printing and digital manufacturing amongst the manufacturing techniques we’re adopting.
5) By enabling new players to enter in the EV (Electric Vehicle) industry solving specific needs in their country or industries and by sharing common technologies, we are contributing to define the new mobility standards.
6) By organizing initiatives and training sessions in loco to enable the participation in the assembly/manufacturing of platforms and complete electric vehicles, involving also local government and municipalities."
(Email, September 2019)
Discussion
How do you see OM fitting into the transformations happening in the world today?
From a query conducted by Jose Ramos for a upcoming book on cosmo-local production:
Yuki Liu:
1. Traditional car sales are plummeting world wide, including in new high growth markets such as China. It has become apparent that the current petroleum based auto industry's business model is terrible for most of its users who can no longer afford cars made to rapidly decay, insurance, expensive parking costs, documents, repairs, wear-parts and the ever climbing price of petroleum based fuels. Younger generations are more interested in getting from point A to point B without having to own anything and succumb to these expenses.
2. At the same time there is a rapid growth in the use of car sharing, ride-hailing services, micro-mobility and public transportation where it is available. It has become clear that the future of the automobile is all about Mobility as a Service (MaaS) as a business model. We are making the first car designed and engineered for exactly this from the ground up. It will be a profound shift of balance for the advantage of growing local economies, maintaining ecologies while scaling with global populations and these important trends. MOST IMPORTANTLY this is a bottom up, democratized systematic network of localized micro-manufacturing. Each point of manufacturing can optimise, scale, and customize according to the cultural, logistics, and economic needs of each region with the full ability to take advantage of small as well as large leaps in technology now on the horizon. It’s a win-win-win for everyone.
3. Modular vehicles were already popular ideas from designers and engineers from Turin, like the Capsula vehicle from Giugiaro back in 1982. In those years, Mobility as a Service providers were so scarce and practically limited to taxi fleets. Now, ride-hailing companies, such as Uber and Didi, became so popular and moving huge fleets of vehicles and they will most likely become the major form of transportation sooner than expected. Right now, they’re operating with traditional vehicles designed and engineered for ownership use, used to be parked +95% of their lifetime. Instead the vehicles for Mobility as a Service could be operating 24h 7days. Some of the most successful car sharing fleets already don’t last longer than 2 years under heavy usage! The business model based on ownership, is clearly too expensive even for companies like Uber who are throwing away thousands of vehicles, and buying thousands of new ones every 2 years. After graduating from Y Combinator in 2016, we collected data directly from those ride-hailing companies and mobility main players, and developed EDIT, our complete modular EV, which is extending the advanced modularity, to the exterior and interior body of the vehicle, to enable easy repairability and upgradeability allowing fleets to last 10 times more under heavy usage. This makes services WAY more sustainable financially and environmentally over throwing away thousands of vehicles every 2 years and buying thousands of new ones again.
4. We integrated into our solutions, an affordable battery swapping system and charging station to lower the cost of infrastructure and impact on the grid, which are still key barriers for the dissemination of more sustainable mobility such as Electric Vehicles in less infrastructured contexts such as the global south and emerging countries. Swapping battery technology is solving the problem of battery deterioration and high costs both in the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and charging station. Fast charging is not sustainable for longer lifespan of batteries and service providers' needs. Our technology allows a full energy charge in less than 5 minutes and has the lowest cost of infrastructure for swapping and charging stations (>10 times more efficient than BetterPlace, Tesla, NIO Swapping battery)
5. New Mobility companies struggle with reverse engineering and to cost-effectively integrate new technology into the closed design of the traditional car. All technologies in a traditional car are locked: same as for an iPhone if you want a better and more performant one you have to buy the next version. Basically, you need to hack the current vehicles and invest time and money in lots of reverse engineering. By adding non-integratable hardware to existing production vehicles, the interior and exterior designs of these vehicles is compromised. That’s why we applied advanced modularity to our fleets: EDIT is a production vehicle, future-proofed and designed specifically to be modular and always upgradeable.
6. Our world is moving towards a technocracy system willing or not. A world where who invest and embrace new technologies quicker is going to lead and influence in the future, while all others will be only followers. Our non-proprietary approach is a contribution towards a universal distributed knowledge and democratized access to technology."
(email, September 2019)