“The basic requirements for the OS Car are: Two passenger
capacity, Ultra-high fuel economy (50+ MPG, city, 100+ MPG, highway),
Ultra-long range (1000+ miles), Low Cost (less than $12,000), Ease of Construction
(1000 hours of construction time. Can be constructed by one person in 1000
hours with a vertical mill, band saw, disc sander, grinding wheel, air
compressor, welder).”

While I wasn’t party to establishing these “basic
requirements” I did communicate with Marcin at some length about this car in
2010. I am confident all these requirements can be met, with the first
prototype more expensive than the required per-unit cost by $3000, to cover
tooling materials and outside labor/services*. I was (and am) so confident that
I offered to put my money where my mouth is—if I was given the responsibility
and authority of project manager and couldn’t bring the project in with a
$15,000 budget, I would donate any additional money needed to bring the project
to completion, on spec and on schedule.

As you who were on the committee considering my proposal
know, the proposal was rejected. I suspect one reason is y’all didn’t have
enough reason to believe I could deliver the goods and another is y’all felt
you could build your OSCar prototype in-house and in parallel with the other 49
devices of the GVCS, more quickly and for less money than by putting me on the
team. We parted amicably, and I was truly rooting for you folks to beat my
schedule (delivery by December 2011) and budget (fifteen grand).

I was also interested to see how many of the design and
concept points we’d disagreed on would be implemented in your finished product.
Although I lack Marcin’s conceptual genius or academic credentials, I’m a
pretty good plodder, and in the small pond of efficient transportation my
experience is of practical value.

But it’s been a year, and in light of the current status of
your OSCar, perhaps you’d be willing to reconsider my qualifications as its
project manager.

Admittedly, I have not improved my academic qualifications
since my original proposal. OSE wiki’s Subject Matter Experts page lists 75
categories under “Experts are needed…” and #3 is “Automotive engineers for open
source car and truck design”. I don’t have an engineering degree, but I do have
considerable engineering knowledge and experience. Other companies have found
ways to exploit my engineering skills (Boeing and Lockheed come to mind) sans
degree, sidestepping their HR departments by contracting with my companies and
letting my own companies hire me to do the work. Surely you can do similarly;
it’s not like it’s a paid position and it doesn’t appear you have suitably
degreed volunteers willing to take the task.

In 2011 I achieved all your OS Car requirements with a car
I’m building for Mother Earth News. It’s called MAX (Mother’s Automotive
eXperiment) and you can find details at…

http://www.motherearthnews.com/blogs/blog.aspx?blogid=1500&tag=MAX

MAX meets or exceeds all your requirements for passenger
capacity, ultra high mileage, and even 1000+mile range (which I think is kind
of silly, and MAX only meets it because it runs on a variety of fuels; a 9
gallon main tank for diesel/biodiesel, and a 2.5 gallon tank for straight
vegetable oil). To date MAX has cost me less than $8000 (which is 2/3 your
$12,000 requirements) and 250 hours of work (which is less than ¼ your 1000
hour requirement), and in 2011 it toured from Oregon to Pennsylvania and back.
MAX has made numerous public showings and public demonstrations, and its best
fuel mileage competition results, in mixed rural and freeway driving, is 127
mpg; see…

http://www.craigvetter.com/pages/2011-%20Fuel%20Economy%20Contests/2011-Mid-Ohio-results.html

So to those who doubted in 2010 that I could be lead
designer and project manager of such a car, I now can stand on my record. I
guess I could have gone back to school and worked on my degree instead, but I
was too busy doing stuff, and to quote the late Roy LoPresti, Everything that
gets taught in school got learned somewhere else.

There has been one significant change in your OS Car project
since 2010: according to the wiki, OSE still intends to have this car
deliverable at the end of 2012, which means you now have 1 year to do it
instead of 2 years, and that’s giving OSE one month’s credit for its research
to date. I suppose the project may have made great progress in secret, but that
seems so contrary to the OSE philosophy of transparency that I think the car
project is currently unguided, and there are no specific plans to get it done.

You have some choices to make before you can go any further.
First of all, you need to decide which of the choices you’ve already made are
set in stone and which are flexible—which are based on knowledge and which are
based on opinion. There are too many technical contradictions on the…

http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Open_Source_Car

http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Open_Source_Car/Research_Development

http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Open_Source_Car/Research_Development/Concept_Design

…pages for them to guide this project as is. If you want the
OS Car project to succeed—that is, meet your requirements, on budget and on
schedule—you need to select a project manager and get on with it.

Which brings me to an important question. Is this a project
you actually want done, or is it serving its purpose in its current state—an
artist’s conception and a lofty goal. If the OS Car’s purpose is to attract
funding, then presenting the concept in the wiki will probably give you a
better ROI than really building it. However, in the long run, I think a flesh-and-blood
OS Car will more than pay for itself—it will add credibility to the whole GVCS
concept, and a car is so much easier to show in person than a bulldozer or CEB
press, because you can drive a car to where it is being shown; drive it to
business meetings, drive it to TED talks, and so forth.

*Outside labor and services will get less expensive as more
of the GVCS is completed, but if you want the car this year, you can’t wait for
the Laser Cutter, CNC Precision Multimachine, and Induction Furnace.