The Industrial Revolution, Karl Marx and the New Digital Age

[MG]

The current copy of Wired magazine has a marvelous cover story on the "new" industrial revolution. Its a long article (and worth every second of your time!) so I will do it a disservice by trying to condense it down to a paragraph or two, but in essence, it refers to how The Industrial Revolution consolidated the manufacturing process into the hands of a few, because the costs of setting up a manufacturing facility became well beyond the means of the common workman.

Karl Marx reportedly worried that a workman would no longer be able to afford the price of  his tools, and when you compare the relatively enormous investment that Henry Ford made in his factories to the investment the Studebaker Brothers made in their blacksmith shop in South Bend, the point is well made.

The article goes on to say that this concentration of manufacturing capability excluded many new ideas from ever being produced or incorporated into the production of others. As a result, society suffered a "great leveling", as Paul Jaray has noted in his latest post in the Saab thread.

BUT......the article says. Today's digital tools are now so affordable that workmen CAN once again afford the price of their tools and so the marketplace is now able to benefit from the input and creative energy of thousands upon thousand of entrepreneurs who would have been shut out previously.

Why and how this works is fascinating reading, but one example that will appeal to all of us who have a special place reserved in our soul for cars is Local Motors, just down the road from where I sit, which is actually designing and producing "open source" vehicles with no manufacturing facility and no inventory.

Read the article and then let us have the benefit of your thinking on this.

[Ultra]

I follow Local Motors on Twitter.  Fantastic ideas come out of there.

[MG]

You guys owe it to yourselves to browse the Local Motors website, if you want to see the future before it gets here. I am hopeful to get an interview with the PTB and do one or more articles on their business.  Fascinating stuff.

[Ultra]

http://www.local-motors.com/

[Otto Puzzell]

Very interesting and laudable.

I've been drawing cars the old fashioned way (pencil and paper) since I was 5, and find creating on/with a computer too limiting.

[Paul Jaray]

When I was at school, I use to drawn cars on my desk. Some of them were so nice (for me and for my friends) that I had to put a transparent sticky tape on it, so that the janitor wouldn'ty be able to 'clean' it. At the end of the year, the whole desk was ..plastified. Following year, different desk.
There was also a side effect: during tests, on my drawings the cars had strange sponsors: "rosa rosae rosae rosam rosa rosa Tires" "drink a2 + b2 = c2" and so on!

[Allemano]

I draw cars since I was able to hold a pencil. Unfortunately I never decided to do it as a professional.
Instead of taking my chance I hung around with my friends doing things which weren't quite helpful for my career....

[Paul Jaray]

When I draw a car on a paper, even these days, my collegues tell me "why aren't you working for Pininfarina?" but we all know the truth: it's quite easy to design a nice car, when you have just your paper as a limit, like it was in the glory old days.
I learnt it when I read an encyclopedia about Giugiaro  and Italdesign. How could he be responsable for the Fiat Duna? Then I realized.
Today, you have to design a car respecting the brand (family feeling), according to the chassis you will use (platforms) and with an eye to the regulations about safety, pollution...
Too boring, let 'em keep on racing on our fantasies (or our desks)!

[Allemano]

The Mercedes Benz design head of Gordon Wagner once said in an interview: "designing a sportcar/supercar is like penalty shooting without the goalie"
I agree with him though I must admit I don't like the sports-/supercars of MB either...

The golden years of (car)design are definetly over. We could open a new thread called: car design by autopuzzles members!
Still have three or four scanned sketches on my HD..

[Ultra]

We could open a new thread called: car design by autopuzzles members!
Still have three or four scanned sketches on my HD..

Please do!

[Otto Puzzell]

This idea is too cool!

[Paul Jaray]

I'll go back to school and ask for those desks!

[MG]

Today, you have to design a car respecting the brand (family feeling), according to the chassis you will use (platforms) and with an eye to the regulations about safety, pollution...

If you venture over to the Local Motors website, you will see that they are unburdened by many of those constraints. They are building cars for a few hundred people at most, not millions upon millions. So it is like Bugatti 100 years ago, Paul. 

Everything old is new again.  Fascinating stuff.