Build an Open-Source Electric Car In About One Hour 188
First time accepted submitter joe5 writes "Like what Elon Musk has done and want to go all Etsy and build your own electric car? That's apparently now possible now thanks to the OSVehicle Tabby — dubbed the first "Open source vehicle" (memo: it may be cool, but it ain't the first). The OSV guys are taking pre-orders for the Tabby starter kit, with both the two-seater or four-seater configurations going for €500. Then you click to add options. (Note: seats is an "option" so that's the level of luxury you are dealing with here.) When the transaction's complete, OSV sends the parts to your home and you can download the plans and start building. Since the Tabby is open source, OSVehicle will also look to a community of owners and tinkerers for suggestions and recommendations."
Fork Slashdot? (Score:5, Interesting)
Fork Slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Misleading pricing in the simmary (Score:2, Interesting)
SIMMARY
FUCK BETA
Not road-safe (Score:2, Interesting)
That vehicle would never get approval where I live, because it does not have suitable protection for driver and passenger. It would get bootstomped the moment an inattentive soccer mom in a big assed hummer H3 started yelling at her "adorable" group of kids, while trying to enter the roadway from the drive-through lane at the fast food gorge-and-puke she stopped at to get "food" for all her "little superstars."
Just like Dice, while performing fellatio on its advertising partners is simply too distracted to pay any attention to the angry mob forming on slashdot until after they find themselves stranded with a poisoned asset after running over all the useful commenters with its big assed hunk of shit: "beta."
The idea is good, but I think I would be better serviced by seeing high capacity battery and charger tech hitting the open maketplace rather than seeing kits like these. There are already very nice high-torque, and high-rpm (and some that are both!) Electric motors on the open marketplace in use in agricultural settings, as well as in other markets, such as elevator drive motors and the like.
The major impediment to major DIY auto conversion is not the availability of body frames or motors, it is the lack of suitably dense power packs. Get the prices down on high capacity electrical storage and charging systems, and get them on the open market, and the conversion kit industry will boom.
Take for instance, things like the greasecar kits, for converting diesel engine vehicles to run on amost pure refuse vegetable oil. Things are really inexpensive. Very popular with the DIY tinkerer demographic.
A whole community could be formed around just providing links to suitable already on the market motors, coupled with the "killer app" of high volume sales of high capacity powerplants and chargers at consumer friendly prices. You'd see plans for engine mounts and drive line converters in mere days if you included a community forum.
Unlike this kit, which is quite clever but little more than an electric golf-kart, selling and making open hardware conversion kits for existing autobodies, and providing sourcing services through the community to locate suitable frames for conversion would get the tinkerer high availability of aftermarket parts for brakes, shocks, struts, bearings, wheels and other accessories, and would get them bodies with well established crash test ratings. (Though performance in crashes would almost certainly change from moving the weight around in the vehicle from the conversion. Even with that caveat, the vehicle would still be designed to attempt to save the driver and passenger's life far more aggressively than this open hardware kit ever will.)
But, wishing for a good, high capacity, and inexpensive powerplant for vehicles on the open market is like trying to collect unicorn sperm, or getting Dice to actually listen about the forced Beta (and Mobile) UI deployments.
Finally, A Possibly Useful Poll Suggestion (Score:5, Interesting)
Will you will actually leave if Beta is implemented?
A) Yes.
B) I'm already working on a Slashdot alternative/competitor.
C) I'm not even here now. I left when it was clear user feedback would be ignored.
D) Rage has limited my response to a constant and inarticulate, "Fuck Beta." Ask me nothing more.
E) I'll say I will but force of habit will prevent it.
F) No.
G) Ever notice how there are no longer any Cowboy Neal options? Guess what made Cowboy Neal leave.
Re:Fork Slashdot? (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately something like 15 years worth of usernames and comments, because although the comments are still owned by each respective user I doubt the database is.
User comments could probably be taken care of on a limited per-user basis by scraping the user's personal page:
http://slashdot.org/~glavenoid [slashdot.org]
If a user opens an account on slashdotan and then _logs_into_slashdot_ via slashdotan (i.e. gives slashdotan his /. username and password) then I believe that the content could be legally scraped.
I'll go register the domain and see what I can code. Anybody who is interested can email me, my Gmail username is the same as my /. username.
Re:I think (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you think a week long boycott would help them reconsider? Anyone serious about leaving should boycott the site from 10th to 17th of Feb. That should give Dice a good indication of what will happen if they force this shit on us.