Jonathan Gitlin

Jonathan Gitlin

Jonathan Gitlin

Jonathan Gitlin

Jonathan Gitlin

Jonathan Gitlin

Jonathan Gitlin

Local Motors is not your regular car company. It's been pioneering the use of open source development to design its vehicles, starting with the Rally Fighter off-road sports car and a number of vehicles that have been the result of competitions, including one held in conjunction with the Department of Energy's ARPA-E. Most recently, the company unveiled Olli, its first autonomous vehicle. When we discovered that Olli was just up the road in National Harbor, Maryland, we decided it was time to head over there to find out more.

Local Motors has a large retail location at National Harbor (selling merchandise), along with a test lab complete with a gigantic 3D printer for rapid prototyping. Several of the company's designs were also on display—the Strati, which was the first 3D-printed car, as well as the Swim, which was the winning design from its Project Redacted competition. And of course, Olli the autonomous people mover.

As we looked at the Swim, David Woessner, general manager at Local Motors, explained the ongoing process that's expanding Local Motors' product line up. "We started in July of 2015. In September of that year, we did the first print and revealed the car in November. It's the next iteration in our path to a highway car."

"Right now we're still working on a test mule for highway certification," he continued. "We'll have a family of low-speed individual vehicles and a family of higher speed highway vehicles that we're now putting together for the crash certification process," he told us. Underneath the Swim's 3D-printed body is a rolling chassis from BMW's i3 electric vehicle. "It was the easiest way for us to get to a vehicle with a body that was in line with a highway certified car," he said.

At the far end of the lab, beyond that gigantic 3D printer, sat Olli. "This is the newest family of vehicles, the Olli. It's in a proof of concept phase and we've already taken orders for it. This is version 0.0 but we're finishing some engineering changes to make it version 1.0," he explained. "It seats 8-12 people, and it's very comfortable on the interior. A lot of the interior is 3D-printed—you can see the refinement versus the Strati. We didn't mill the finish but you can see the refinement of the printing. And a lot of the tooling for the form-pulled plastics were 3D-printed, as were the wheel wells. The other big thing is it's all-electric, and it uses lidar and autonomous technology." As currently configured, Olli has a range of 60 miles (100km) at speeds of between 12-18mph (19-29km/h).

Olli is a little reminiscent of the autonomous people movers that are now being tested in the UK. But the vehicle is not actually in service yet. "We're getting calls right now from people asking to ride Olli," Woessner said. "We're in the process of working with the team to make that a reality... but also to get the regulations in place. There's a couple of things from a final development and testing perspective we need to finish with the vehicle. And then for the state of Maryland there's currently no autonomous driving regulation. In National Harbor, though, we have some private roads with our partners at the Peterson companies that we're working on getting permission to use, and we're mapping out the right route to have people experience Olli," he told us, adding that the hope is to have everything ready for operations to begin later this summer.

Local Motors is an active participant in Maryland's process of crafting regulations for autonomous vehicles. "The one challenge we've seen is that the group is focused primarily on highway vehicles. We're interested in that application, but the low speed is where we think the initial consumer applications will be, particularly for environments like National Harbor or the National Mall in DC, or some large parks like Disney," Woessner said."We want regulations that are appropriate for that use case versus highway speed. I think there's the potential to tailor legislation and regulation for driving on an interstate or state highway versus a county or local road at a speed of less than 25mph."

Listing image by Jonathan Gitlin