opensourcescooter.com

Our goal is to create a platform for change, to empower the young and old and to design an electric scooter. This scooter will be as environmentally friendly as possible. Through collaboration and the open source nature of the design we hope to create a vehicle that will become a way of life for people. A scooter of a modular nature that allows a community to work together to create a form of transportation that can be fully customized by individuals to suit their needs. A vehicle that is never thrown away only ever upgraded and one that you can trully own in every sense of the word.

Why

...we chose a scooter

• The scooter is a size that makes this project very achievable
• Scooter are very affordable, much more so than a prius
• They are more uni sex than a motor bike
• You can ride them to work in a suit
• They are affordable and allow people freedom of movement at a low cost (especially for young people)
• They are light. While cars are great a massive amount of energy is wasted just moving them around a scooter is relatively light in comparison
• A scooter is of a scale that it is feasible to build in an open source way

...open source

• Making the scooter Open source means that you can change it, evolve it and most importantly build all this upon foundations of others. We feel that this will stimulate faster more rapid and innovative development of modern transportation.
• To make the best possible design as accessible (cheep) as possible. Key components like drive controllers and brushless dc motors need to become the best in the world... most efficient in cost and energy usage. This is only possible if people from around the world in garages and universities help improve the designs

Where

This is a great chance for people all around the world to work together.

When

For now and in the future.

How

Through the dedicated efforts of people of all backgrounds.

Our Licence - BSD style licence - watch this space for the final licence.

When we say open source this does not imply people giving away all their intellectual property for no financial benefit. Yes the engineering and designs that we are focusing on will be available totally free. But when we say free we mean free to modify, we are going to have a set of key components and the only requirement for you to build a compatible component is that it has compatible connections, and there is an open source alternative. For example you could design and patent special shock absorbers as long as they connected seamlessly as a replacement for the open source ones. The only requirement being that the connections would need to be open sources so other people could remove you shocks and replace them with different ones.