CHAPTER 4

THE WISDOM OF CARS

In the summer of 2011, John B. Rogers (everyone calls him Jay), chief executive officer of Local Motors, a micro car factory in Phoenix, Arizona, received a surprise phone call. Regina Dugan was on the other end of the line. Would he, she asked, be interested in crowd sourcing a marine assault vehicle for DARPA?

Dugan had found the right guy. Rogers, a former marine, is an evangelist for what he calls “cocreation.” It’s not an alternative theory for evolution; rather it’s an offshoot of crowd sourcing, and Rogers has staked his entire business on the concepts of open-source code, Wikipedia, Creative Commons, and the inherent wisdom of crowds—taking designs and suggestions from the thousands of gear heads that frequent his company’s discussion boards, working with those who proffer the best ideas, and putting them to work. Local Motors designs and builds cars by committee—except in this case the committee is comprised of tens of thousands of do-it-yourselfers and professional auto designers. Rogers, in his late thirties, was on a mission to upend 150 years of industrial production tradition. After all, the Wright Brothers were the ultimate DIYers and they had invented the airplane.

At first, Rogers had misgivings about working with DARPA. His life in the military had taught him that government agencies were thick with red tape. Not only that, but as Dugan laid out her plans to crowdsource battlefield armaments and vehicles, using language like “flexible, programmable, potentially distributed production capability able to accommodate a wide range of systems and system variants with extremely rapid reconfiguration timescales” he recognized it for what it was: a series of microfactories churning out highly customizable vehicles. It was if she had read his business plan, which, given whom she worked for, he supposed she had.

He pointed out that Local Motors wasn’t a defense contractor. It had no experience with strict regulations and didn’t have a federal acquisition record. Dugan assured him none of that would be necessary.

“Look,” she said, “you know how to do this so do it and show the world we can do it.”

Jay Rogers had always loved tinkering. A child of privilege who grew up in Palm Springs, Florida, the youngest of four children of a real estate developer, he took apart his bicycle and modified his skateboard. Once he designed his own model car with a rocket launcher and minicamera, engaging in long-distance reconnaissance. With a remote control he controlled the car, taking it well outside his field of vision, and fired rockets off the roof. When he was fourteen he took an elective course on automotive mechanics at boarding school at Groton in Connecticut, and under the tutelage of a teacher rebuilt a couple of 1950s Porsches and a Volvo station wagon.

He inherited his love of cars, trucks, and things that run—the “Preston Tucker curse,” as he calls it—from his grandfather, Ralph Burton Rogers, an automotive innovator who installed the first diesel engine in a car. Toward the end of World War II he bought motorcycle manufacturer Indian Motors from the DuPont family, a company that had been founded in 1909. When he took it over Indian Motors was a preeminent brand, the biggest motorcycle company in America, bigger than Harley. One of his first moves was to purchase a huge factory where Rolls-Royce produced aircraft engines so that Indian could aggressively expand and brought manufacturing down to a single floor to make it easier to move equipment and parts through. At the beginning, Indian was thriving, riding the motorcycle’s prewar popularity, which was in part tied to the poor condition of America’s roads. Many were dirt trails while others were pocked with potholes. And the best way to get around these rutted roads was on a motorcycle. With the emergence of the American highway system, however, followed by the import of cheaper bikes that were built for leisure from England and then Japan, Indian found its product mix all wrong. By 1953 it was out of business.

Growing up, Rogers listened to his grandfather’s stories and absorbed valuable lessons, which helped shape his vision for Local Motors. Don’t get whipsawed by changes in customer preference, make your facility and your capability nimble enough to adapt quickly. There was also a more humanistic life lesson wrapped up in all this: failure is good. Until then, everything his grandfather touched had turned to gold. He made a million dollars as an investment banker by the time he was thirty, and with that he bought Rogers Diesel and Aircraft. Then he acquired Indian, which started off so promising, only to crash less than a decade later.

Like his grandfather, Rogers experienced firsthand what it was like to have a fortune, live in splendor, and lose it all. When he was sixteen his parents sat him and his brothers and sister down to tell them that they were no longer rich. His father had invested heavily in Houston—he had developed much of the city’s downtown—and the Texas savings-and-loan crisis hit. Suddenly Houston land values were dropping to pennies on the dollar and the family’s entire fortune evaporated. “Things may change,” he told his children, and they did. Creditors took just about everything—the mansion, the boat, the cars, furniture. His father had set aside rainy day trusts for his older children, enough to pay for graduate school, but there was little else. Until now Rogers had grown up worldly wise but with a silver spoon, and to have it all disappear was the first glimmer that nothing in life was guaranteed. Instead of being set for life his father, at the age of sixty-five, had to return to work.

Rogers dipped into his siblings’ trust funds to pay for Princeton, where he pursued a double major, an esoteric mix of engineering and art history, graduating in 1995. After a couple of years in China, helping his father with a new medical testing products business (like most start-ups, it failed), he worked at an investment bank in Dallas. At twenty-eight he joined the marines, graduating first out of nine hundred recruits in basic school, and serving three tours of duty.

It was toward the end of his military service, when he realized the war in Iraq was at its crux about our nation’s reliance on foreign oil, that Rogers first thought of starting a car company. He was concerned about not only our collective carbon footprint but our geopolitical footprint. After returning stateside he considered launching a company to build hydrogen-powered cars, but realized it was too risky: he would be dependent on others’ scientific advances. What he really wanted was to build cars that people would actually buy, and that meant getting them from concept to design to manufacturing and on the road in a fraction of the time that Detroit could.

He enrolled at Harvard Business School, where he developed his ideas, and once he graduated set out to raise money for his fledgling car business. It wasn’t easy. One of his first calls was to Lew Lehrman, who once ran for New York State governor against Mario Cuomo. But he wanted 90 percent of the company in exchange for a one-million-dollar investment. Rogers asked if there were circumstances that could convince him to invest the money in exchange for a much lower equity stake, and Lehrman replied only if Rogers found another investor whom he trusted. Then he would take a similar deal. Rogers called the owners of Factory Five, a Wareham, Massachusetts–based company that designs and manufactures assembly kits for cars, who had been advising him from the start. But they declined his offer to invest in his business. They had their own company to run and risks to handle. But they were willing to trade factory space, tools, and an engineer, worth the equivalent of one million dollars, in exchange for a 15 percent equity stake in Local Motors. Months later Rogers returned to Lehrman, who gave him a million dollars in cash at the same valuation.

Eventually, Rogers would raise seven million dollars.

The Rally Fighter

On an early June 2012 day in the desert, 110 degrees in the shade, I’m chilling on the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona, in a Rally Fighter, Local Motors’ flagship vehicle, when the driver asks if I want to go airborne.

“Hell, yeah,” I say. I mean, who wouldn’t?

He tells me to pin the back of my head against the seat (to protect against whiplash), revs the engine, and in seconds we’re up to eighty miles per hour, screaming toward a ramp outside the Local Motors factory. The car sails upward until gravity asserts itself. We don’t stay airborne long—maybe a couple of seconds. The landing feels like getting jostled in a mosh pit. Not something I would try in a Ford Explorer.

Inside Local Motors’ thirty-thousand-square-foot, spick-and-span factory I join Jay Rogers. With short hair, freshly pressed khakis, and ramrod-straight posture and military bearing, he looks like he could still complete boot camp. We’re in the cleanest factory I’ve ever seen, well lit, with none of the telltale signs that automobiles are being born and serviced here—no oil splotches on the ground, heavy machines, or assembly lines. Tools are neatly organized on shelves. A tower of potted plants winds to the ceiling—there, Rogers informs me, to help offset the factory’s carbon footprint. A half-dozen Rally Fighters in various states of undress lay around. One is earmarked for a customer in Poland, another is just a shell, a third is about to be wrapped in the vinyl Local Motors uses instead of paint. Customers have spent eighty thousand dollars and want a fully customized vehicle that rubs against much of the conventional wisdom coming out of both Detroit and Japan.

After Rogers made the decision to build cars he realized a hybrid or electric car was beyond his technological capabilities and would take too long to develop. Besides, he didn’t think he could sell a car based on its having less impact on the environment. The Prius, for example, sold for only four thousand dollars more than a comparable make with a standard gas-guzzling engine. He also concluded that the conventional wisdom coming out of Detroit was wrong.

Automakers claim that heavier cars are safer, but that isn’t true. Bigger cars are safer, because in a crash energy is dissipated throughout the car’s body. But bigger doesn’t necessarily mean heavier. If Rogers jettisoned the heavy steel used in most American cars and created bodies out of much lighter composites, he could manufacture an automobile that was large and weighed a lot less, with a wide wheelbase for stability. Composites provided other advantages. They cost less because steel tools are expensive and require vast amounts of energy, and working with composites enabled Local Motors to be nimble and instantly respond to customer tastes. He could quickly and easily change the look of a car by asking customers what they wanted. And he could wrap the vehicle in nylon wrap, which means there’s no need for toxic paints.

Rogers leads me to a black Rally Fighter etched with red flames, which the buyer had put on. “Is this a small car?” he asks rhetorically. The wheelbase stretches as wide as an SUV’s. “Is it a short car? It’s frigging long. And is it lightweight? About eight hundred pounds,” less than half the weight of a similarly sized car from Detroit. “It’s hugely lightweight compared to other cars in its class.”

He runs his fingers along the roll bar arcing across the reinforced cabin. Thus far two customers have suffered major accidents, he tells me, and both walked away without a scratch. In the more serious crash the driver hit a boulder field at fifty miles an hour, rolled over three times, and landed on the roof. Upside down he opened the door and crawled out unhurt. The car was totaled on the outside, yet the inside was virtually untouched. In February 2013 a Rally Fighter in the Parker 425 off-road race in Arizona flipped over and kept on racing, finishing fourth that day.

During his due diligence phase, before he started the company, Rogers wondered about potential lawsuits. He questioned the Factory Five owners, who create car kits for classic automobiles, and they told him seven people died operating their cars. If that were true, Rogers wondered, how could they still be in business? Easy, they said, because their customers built the cars themselves. If you’re dead, you don’t sue anyone, they explained. It’s the families who would. But at a wake or funeral friends and relatives would say, “That Bob, he loved cars and he died doing what he loved.” Suddenly he’s a hero, a man who lived by his own rules.

Before Rogers started his business, within this protoplasm of ambition there lacked a strategy for creating designs guaranteed to sell. Designing and manufacturing any car was a risk. It was always possible that no matter what focus groups told you or how good you thought your design was, consumers might not want it. Who could forget the Ford Edsel, a $350-million dud that became synonymous with product failures in the late 1950s? Three and a half decades later Ford squandered six billion dollars on a “world car” that it could sell in multiple countries instead of tailoring vehicles for different tastes across multiple markets. Marketed in the early 1990s as the Ford Contour and Mercury Mystique in the United States, the car took eight years to develop—double the time it typically takes to design and manufacture a vehicle from scratch—and sold poorly until it was discontinued. One thing Rogers wouldn’t do is get smacked down by abrupt changes in consumer taste like his grandfather did with Indian Motors.

Then he came across Threadless, a T-shirt maker in Chicago. Threadless was up against Gap, Old Navy, and the like—the clothing equivalent of the big carmakers. On the Gap’s profit-and-loss statements is a multimillion-dollar write-down of unsold inventory from either mispricing products or simply missing the market. That was its Achilles’ heel. Because Threadless founders didn’t know how to outsource production to China, and were reluctant to risk precious start-up capital on designs that might not appeal to consumers, they had them designed by members of their community. This would in effect market-test the T-shirts before they were produced. Then they manufactured them with hand presses in Chicago, which was more expensive than having them made and shipped from China, but they sold every single shirt they made. What if, Rogers thought, he applied that model to cars?

Relying on large groups working toward their own ends while simultaneously attempting to achieve mutual goals to design and manufacture a car is not as farfetched as you might think. While America has always thought of its innovative heroes as lone wolves—from Thomas Edison to Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, and Steve Jobs—many of science’s greatest advancements have arisen from the work of tightly knit groups of thinkers and doers: the Manhattan Project, the space program, the Human Genome Project. More than sixty years ago a collection of Bell Labs scientists invented the transistor, which proved to be the foundation for all the digital products that followed. Commingling in one place, they developed the programming languages Unix and C, which are the building blocks for all computer operating systems today, as well as the silicon solar cell and the first fiber-optic cable, communications satellite, and cellular telephone system.

Bell Labs owed much of its success to its leader, Mervin Kelly, who strove to create an “institute of creative technology” where a “critical mass” of talented people could foster a heady exchange of ideas, according to Jon Gertner, author of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. Kelly even relied on architecture as a conversation catalyst, with Bell Labs’ main building characterized by hallways so long a person couldn’t see all the way to the end. This made it virtually impossible for someone ambling down the hall to avoid getting pulled into conversations with colleagues and acquaintances, or running into diversions, which could help provide inspiration for the next great thing. “A physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings,” Gertner wrote. Steve Jobs, offering input on Apple’s headquarters, demanded the same approach. Another group of researchers at Xerox Parc built on this work to divine the graphical user interface that has characterized decades of personal computing, and two groups of physicists in Switzerland worked together and competed to seek proof of the elusive Higgs boson, which, because it may explain mass, tells us why our atoms don’t zip around the universe at the speed of light.

Nowadays the real and virtual worlds are melding. Harvard research fellow Neal Gabler says we are heading toward a more globalized understanding of innovation, one buttressed by ever more powerful connectivity. Collaboration is no longer a product of physical proximity; collaboration can occur over vast distances and yield the benefits of bringing great minds and skills together. And these participants need not be so-called experts. They can simply be those driven by keen interest. Yet their labors, when combined with others’, can create a whole far greater than the sum of its parts.

Not surprisingly, collaboration thrives online, where physical distance is dissolved by constant connectivity. Wikipedia is the ultimate crowdsourced project. An open-source collective of programmers coded Mozilla’s Firefox browser. After a contest Netflix handed out one million dollars in prize money to BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos, a seven-person team comprised of mathematicians and computer engineers whose members hailed from the United States, Austria, Canada, and Israel. They produced software 10 percent better at predicting which movies customers would like based on past preferences than Netflix on its own had. Entire businesses have sprouted up based on the concept. ChallengePost allows organizations, including government, to challenge the public to solve big problems through competitions. On Kickstarter, artists, musicians, filmmakers, and entrepreneurs crowdsource funding. Kaggle’s community of scientists and engineers—some professional, others capable hobbyists—compete for money to solve vexing scientific problems like predicting the outcome of the World Cup, the likelihood that Allstate would have to pay for bodily injury in the event of a crash, how much shoppers will spend at a grocery store, the progression of HIV in patients, and the location of dark matter in the universe. The contests with the most commercial impact are invite-only, and Kaggle doesn’t disclose who sponsors them or what research questions they have posed.

Waze is a smart phone map app that alerts drivers to the latest traffic tie-ups by soliciting up-to-the-minute information from other users. Mechanical Turk crowdsources microtasks. Even news is being crowdsourced: the Guardian crowdsourced the expense reports of British politicians. The Washington Post, New York Times, and others asked readers to scour an ennui-inducing trove of Sarah Palin e-mails written when she was Alaska governor, and Gawker looked for help in deciphering financial statements that purportedly came from Mitt Romney when he was running for president. CNN and other news media harvest tweets and Facebook posts for on-the-ground eyewitness accounts from places reporters can’t be and ask viewers to submit user-generated content such as photos and video. Crowdsourcing has even spread to law enforcement. The FBI crowdsourced cryptography in a murder investigation, requesting the public’s help in deciphering two encrypted notes found in the pocket of a victim dumped in a field.

Rogers, recalling Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems, who famously said, “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else,” envisioned a community around automobile design that he could learn from. Why would people come and design for him? “They design to win a prize if they get it, but they design to gain notoriety and hopefully to get a job,” he says. Rogers knew less than 30 percent of car design students ultimately find work at auto companies, with the remainder finding other careers. But that didn’t mean they didn’t have a yen for designing cars. They were exactly the pool of talent he sought. These auto enthusiasts would join because they could work on their own inspirations. Maybe on their day job they couldn’t, but at night, on weekends, and during their spare time they could. Then they could share their ideas with others, maybe even bring them to market.

When the community was thriving he would hold design contests. The incentive to play would come from sheer competition and the thirst to win. This would result in participants trying to outdo one another with better designs. Not everyone would participate, of course. Some would be content to just offer feedback, and they would receive credit in the community for their input. This, too, in a sense, derived from competition, because don’t we all want to be recognized as particularly astute by our peers? But there would be a spirit of teamwork, of people congregating because of a shared passion for automotive design. Those who didn’t enter the competitions would be just as valuable as those who did. They would offer know-how, suggestions, and feedback on designs, and act as members of a vast focus group.

Rogers set up shop in a three-thousand-square foot microfactory in an industrial park in Wareham, Massachusetts, down the street from Factory Five Racing. When the community grew to thirty-five thousand members exchanging designs and ideas on the Local Motors Web site, and there were six thousand designs to choose from, Rogers sat down at a table with his small team—which included a couple of engineers, his chief technology officer, and a few others—to discuss what the company’s first car would be. With so many designs, all covered by creative commons licenses, each had an opinion. At one point they coalesced around an ecofriendly commuter car for city dwellers, but Rogers nixed it.

“Here’s the deal,” he told them. “It’s going to be large, it’s going to be lightweight, and it’s going to be cool looking. That’s all I know. It can be any kind of car you want to make but this one’s out.” Of all the designs they liked only one met this criteria.

The designer, Sangho Kim, a thirty-year-old graphic arts student at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, had modeled his illustrations on the P-51 Mustang fighter plane, a staple of World War II and the Korean War. It proved a popular choice among community members, who proffered secondary features and components such as a light bar and side vents. It was designated a kit car so buyers would be required to come to the factory premises to assemble the car under the watchful eye of Local Motors engineers. That way Rogers was able to skirt federal and state regulations like equipping his car with expensive air bags.

While the community crafted the exterior, Local Motors designed or selected the chassis, engine, and transmission. This combination—have the pros handle the elements that are critical to performance, safety, and manufacturability while the community designs the parts that give the car its shape and style—allows crowd sourcing to work even for a product whose use has life-and-death implications.

Rogers’ engineers built the vehicle, and when the souped-up off-road Rally Fighter (sticker price then seventy-nine thousand dollars; now closer to a hundred thousand dollars) rolled off the assembly line in late 2010, it had been forged from parts cobbled together from Chevy, BMW, and a host of other automotive companies. A reviewer from Popular Mechanics took it for a spin and completed an off-road course in less than half the time a standard four-by-four could do it. He raved about the Rally Fighter with its “daddy-longlegs suspension,” comparing it favorably to a Lotus; Jalopnik, the auto blog, called it the “coolest looking car ever.” The Car Throttle blog calls it “the most badass car you’ve never heard of.”

Rogers takes me out to the factory floor. “I could spend forever out here,” he says, pointing to a first-generation Rally Fighter. “It has all kinds of crowdsource-based decisions in it. Many are right; some are not. The only way you learn what works and what doesn’t is by building a car and getting it out there.”

He was echoing Lean Startup methodology, first conceived by entrepreneur Eric Ries (author of a bestselling book). A core feature is “the build-measure-learn feedback loop.” This requires developing a “minimum viable product” (MVP), quickly getting it out to market, then adjusting it on the fly once feedback rolls in. Of course, as Rogers put it, it’s never fun when customers call “to bitch and moan,” and at the beginning of production he wondered how did he and his engineers get things so wrong. But they had created a customer feedback loop that empowered their customers to tell them what they liked and disliked about the car, and virtually every new piece of data that came in made the Rally Fighter better.

Rogers shows me a car from Local Motors’ first batch, a rugged, mostly well-designed mishmash of parts. The engine is a General Motors–sourced, 6.2-liter V8 often found in a Chevrolet Corvette. The steering column and wheel are from a Ford F-Series pickup. Mercedes-Benz made the fuel tank. The side mirrors come from a Dodge Challenger, the rear tail lamps from a Honda Civic Coupe, and the door handles from a Mazda Miata. It’s a brawny, muscular street-legal vehicle with knobby thirty-three-inch tires.

He flicks at the door handle. “This was a bad decision given that this is a desert racing car,” he says. “Heat that up to 110 degrees outside in the Arizona heat and you’ll burn your hand. But we really couldn’t have known that no matter how much computer simulation we did.”

Leaky windows were another issue. Stop in a storm and rain hit the domed roof, rolled down the front, slipped down the strap, and snuck inside, dripping on the driver’s knee. Local Motors solved this by adding a mini gutter to redirect the water. Then there was the time Rogers took his wife and three kids on a seven-thousand-mile summer vacation drive in one of the first Rally Fighters. They arrived in Maine and his wife caught her eye on a sharp edge that held a strap on the inside of the door. “I almost took out my wife’s eye,” he says. “I’m not going to take out other peoples wife’s eyes.” This, too, changed.

After manufacturing twenty-five Rally Fighters, Rogers shut down the factory to institute two hundred changes to the vehicle. Six months later a much better car emerged. As he looks back, Rogers says, “We shouldn’t have sold twenty-five and taken six months off. We should have sold five and taken two months off, and then sold another five and taken two months off again.” Again, he’s talking the language of lean start-up methodology. Analyze users’ feedback, fix the product, try again, rinse, repeat.

He relocated the factory to Arizona in 2010 because, he says, the Rally Fighter is a desert racing car and it makes no sense to manufacture and sell microfactory-made desert racing cars in Massachusetts.

Then DARPA’s Regina Dugan called.

The XC2V

Local Motors was awarded a $639,000 contract it hadn’t even bid on and set to producing a drive train and chassis based on a set of specifications that DARPA would provide for what the agency was calling an “Experimental Crowd-derived Combat-support Vehicle,” or XC2V. It had to be a high-speed recovery and resupply vehicle—it wouldn’t be armored and wouldn’t be designed for infantry. DARPA issued a challenge to the community of car buffs that frequent Local Motors’ message boards: design a ground combat vehicle with the capability to medevac two people and resupply troops in combat, and offered a total of ten thousand dollars in prize money, with first place winning seventy-five hundred dollars.

In four weeks more than 600 submissions came in, of which 162 were deemed buildable by Local Motors and DARPA engineers. The crowd voted on the best design and the winner was Victor Garcia from Aubrey, Texas, who held a degree in transportation design. He exemplified the talents of Local Motors’ community members. As a contract worker for Peterbilt, a truck maker in Texas, the thirty-four-year old learned his health insurance wouldn’t cover his son’s birth. When he heard about the seventy-five-hundred-dollar prize for first place, he jumped at it. The money would just about cover his wife’s doctors’ bills. A military history buff—he still has his G.I. Joe collection from childhood—he was excited about the prospect of designing a military vehicle. Garcia spent almost every spare moment that month working on his 3-D models.

In his presentation, Garcia listed several inspirations for his design. It had to be agile like a jet fighter, leopard, and race car; purposeful like a honeybee and medieval armor or reinforced exoskeleton; and aggressive (think scorpion and wolf). He called his SUV on steroids Flypmode, partly because it could be almost instantly reconfigured for combat, to carry wounded soldiers from the battlefield or through thick jungle, or to transport supplies. For such a large vehicle it was surprisingly lightweight and thin yet well protected, and offered clear sightlines for soldiers to return fire. Designed to carry four people, the vehicle’s back could slide out to transport two or even three wounded soldiers. The exterior had what he called “aggressive aesthetics” to better “intimidate the enemy.”

Garcia worked with Local Motors’ engineers during the building phase, and they communicated with car buffs in the community, some who were competing and many others who were providing feedback. They started with the chassis to the Rally Fighter, which they modified to account for larger wheels while the one-piece fiberglass body was cut differently to account for much more glass. The seats came from MasterCraft, which makes off-road race car seats with more robust suspension. Hinges originated from the Jeep Wrangler, the axle could be found on a Ford F-150 and some F-250 pickup trucks, and General Motors manufactured the transmission. The rollers and sliders for the tailgate, which was reinforced with a cable when pulled out and had to be strong enough to carry half a ton of human cargo over rocky terrain at breakneck speed, were used on factory assembly lines.

The engineers received the design on March 15, 2011, and delivered the finished vehicle by June 20. “It was a lot of work getting the glass made, getting all of those body structures to work, fit, and function, as well as incorporating the hinges, latches, and door jambs,” Daid Riha, Local Motors chief engineer, says. At a key time Victor Garcia disappeared for a few days—it turned out his house had been hit by a tornado (no one was hurt). Despite all that, two days after Garcia’s son was born the Flypmode, or as Darpa called it, XC2V, was ready for the road.

The XC2V was unveiled in June 2011 at Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. President Obama hailed it as a way to get products “out to theater faster, which could save lives more quickly,” and said the technology would transfer faster to the private sector. “It’s good for American companies,” the president said. “It’s good for American jobs. It’s good for taxpayers. And it may save some lives in places like Afghanistan for our soldiers.”

For Garcia, though, the best part of the ceremony was hitching a ride in his own creation. The vehicle, with its Corvette engine, was so powerful it practically lifted off the ground. “It’s one thing to look at drawings,” he says, “but to feel it, to experience it, was just awesome.” His newfound notoriety also helped him wrangle a job out of it. Peterbilt, the truck manufacturer, promoted Garcia from contract worker to full-time senior designer with health benefits.

The XC2V had passed its first test. Dugan proposed to roll out this ambitious, more open process across DARPA to improve weapons systems, train soldiers, and even change the way the military does business. But then she left the agency for Google, where she is a senior engineer. Time will tell if the agency builds on her work or continues to conduct business as usual.

By the beginning of 2013 Local Motors has manufactured and sold more than a hundred Rally Fighters and its community participated in dozens of company-sponsored design competitions offering prize money. On The Forge, which is the name of Local Motors’ community Web site, there was the BMW urban driving challenge, Domino’s ultimate pizza delivery truck competition, and the Peterbilt truck design battle. There were competitions for motorcycles—the winner was built by DP Customs, a motorcycle maker from nearby Fall River, Arizona—a foldable three-wheeled bicycle with electric motor, custom car skins, and door handles. Shell Oil has sponsored “game changer” competitions for fuel-efficient cars designed for various cities around the world, including Amsterdam, Bangalore, Houston, and Sao Paolo. The community has created designs for vehicles to transport hunters in Texas and another for braving Alaskan blizzards. Reebok sponsored a contest for a new kind of shoe.

Designs for vehicles, at least, have the potential to end up as the next car that Local Motors produces, after the two hundredth Rally Fighter rolls out of the factory. But Rogers doesn’t intend to stop there. He wants to help users who have designs they’re passionate about build their dream cars from scratch at a Local Motors microfactory. Rogers would rent them the space and provide tools and engineering assistance, if needed. He even has a tag line: “Empowering a World of Auto Makers.”

It’s a long way off, he admits, the power to completely democratize the design, creation and sales of cars. But you can’t change the world if you don’t dream big.