I love the spirit! I think about open sourcing vehicles all the time, but unfortunately I think the biggest hurdle might be in what constitutes a street-legal vehicle.

Even though there's lots of dangerous problems with closed source cars, I'm pretty sure there's some litany of safety / engineering standards that manufacturers have to meet, as well as passing "smog tests" in many places. (EVs still on the table tho...?)

So, an open source vehicle would be more transparent, which would be a huge win! But also if it was a community initiative like say, RepRap, I imagine there'd be a lot of red tape with user-designed or hypothetically 3D printed cars or somesuch, especially when it comes to safety standards.

The biggest worries I'd have would be how much interest such projects would get from safety engineers and other pros who know how to make the thing not kill the user.

Am I way off? I'd love to hear I'm wrong and there's plenty of hope for this to be a thing. I really hate modern car manufacturers. They all suck. Their proprietary lock-in and user-hostile attitude sucks. We need better. :)

I would assume an open source e-bike would probably be the place to start.

Someone elsewhere in the thread linked https://www.openmotors.co/product/tabbyevo/, which I had never heard of before and which is actually pretty fascinating.

I'd obviously say the best open source vehicles are bikes and scooters, but I understand that currently isn't an option for everyone and that even in the ideal scenario there's going to need to be a small number of cars, trucks and vans. IDK how practical something like this will really be, but it's at least pretty neat.