Oscar = Open Source Car | Hacker News Reader

Oscar = Open Source Car

theoscarproject.org

25 pointspuente12 comments

Like most open source projects, this has good intentions, good technology, and a terrible design.

> Form follows function.

Apple begs to differ, and they have been extremely successful thanks to their philosophy. Form very often shapes function and it's at the core of a product's usability.

When designing something as complex as a car, form and function need to be equally considered every step of the way.

Patches welcome.

Also, keep in mind that Apple themselves adopt existing open source projects for their own use. There's no reason a similar relationship couldn't exist here. And the hobbyist crowd they're currently targeting are unlikely to give a shit.

>When designing something as complex as a car, form and function need to be equally considered every step of the way.

That's not how apple did it.

Apple took an existing operating system that really only considered function, freebsd, and then built something pretty on and around it.

I mean, I'm not criticizing apple; they followed the rules and built something the FreeBSD team could not have built, and most FreeBSD guys I know are pretty happy with what apple did.

If you were going with the apple model for these cars, what you'd do is first build ugly cars that take an expert to drive that are extremely fast, utilitarian and reliable, but licence them under the BSD licence.

Next, have some for-profit company take the design, put a lot of effort in to making it look nice, add features that make it easy for a novice to drive, and then sell the new cars for a whole lot of money.

I mean, it's a great idea, but you need the FreeBSD of cars before you can have the Apple of cars.

I am recently trying to understand what people mean specifically by terrible design. Can you be specific about what you disliked about the existing design?

It usually means: "I don't like it".

Looks dead? Forum is offline and the last update appears to be 2006?

Hi there! No its not. It might look like it. You are right! but that is because we've just upload an old version.

The thing is that it wasn't working that smoothly and we had to take it down for improvements. Furthermore, some IPA issues occured with several OEMs, and we have to clear them first before we switch on the new version.

Design follows form is basically a heuristic for order. We dont say that form is less important, not priorizin either. We are are just implying the logical design order; first you develop the core, then you make it look good! Its just another way more poetic to put it.

Good night from Munich!!

Something like this was actually the idea I sent to Google Project 10^100. It was more specific because the goal was to have a cheap electric car but the design concept was very similar. I'm glad that someone had the same idea, will try to help :)

You wouldn't download a car?

Who can tell me about the legalities of home-made cars? What kind of hoops do you have to jump before using something like this on a public road?

there's president. people have built 'kit cars' from plans for ages. here's what the CA DMV has to say about it:

http://www.dmv.ca.gov/vr/spcnsreg.htm

It doesn't sound easy, but it doesn't sound difficult compared to actually building the thing.

did I really just say "there's president"? jesus.

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