Yesterday, I visited the National Harbor facility, where final tweaks were being made on the 12-seat Olli for the unveiling. The place was bustling with workers who were wiring the minibus with sensors for self driving. Local Motors executives were getting ready for their most high-profile event to date perhaps since the Rally Fighter (which plays a part in next year’s Fast 8) was first shown in 2009. The Olli will be giving passengers demo rides here throughout the summer. In addition, visitors to the National Harbor will be able to view 3D-printing capabilities first used in the Strati in 2014 onsite, and experiment with 3D printing themselves.

CEO and co-founder John B. Rogers, Jr. stopped by to chat with me for a moment. "There is no more connected technology possible than a car, you just have to make it work," he says. "The Strati is the idea of what does a $5,000 car look like? And an Olli is, what does it mean to share [a car]? The future is full of both. In the future, it is shared transportation that is organizationally owned, there will be shared transportation that is privately owned, and then there will be transportation that is not shared that is privately owned. We’ll have all these."

"There is no more connected technology possible than a car, you just have to make it work."

Local Motors will also extend its practice of using "microfactories" to build more than rendered designs. "We’ve just taken control of our first powertrain and our communities will open-source the powertrain," Rogers says. "Once you control the powertrain, then we control the building of the vehicle. The motor and the sensors and electronics is something we can partner very well with other people. And we can buy the battery from a lot of people, whether it’s Tesla Energy or Samsung SDI."

But crowdsourcing is a key concept of Local Motors’ approach. ("It’s why we’re here, says one Local Motors staffer.) The designer of the Olli, Edgar Sarmiento, a Colombian-born Italian car design student, had just arrived and seen the results of the first printing of his work, and had a somewhat stunned smile. He will earn royalties from his winning submission. "I tried to make this vehicle flexible to a lot of things," he told me. "This one is a public solution for cities. It’s simple, minimalistic, to make a shape like a box, and all of this related to the use of the product. I was born in Bogotá, a big city that is going to reach 10 million people. It’s a context to start to think of problems in the city as far as transportation and to think of solutions."

Also on site was Bret Greenstein, vice president of IBM IoT, who explained how Olli would use sensors and speech-to-text to learn about its passengers. "We do everything through voice and we translate language and combine it with other data," he says. "We’ll try to build as much of the experience and let the vehicle know about you so it can build your experience — favorite restaurant, what dry cleaner you use. There’s things you can define in a profile, or things you can learn as you go."