Fiat Brazil has released some details of its first ever crowdsourced car concept, Fiat Mio, which is due to be unveiled at the International Automobile Fair in Sao Paulo during October.

A 3D rendering of the car has been created at the Fiat Style Centre revealing a small and curvaceous two-seater city car with a huge moulded windscreen that wraps around the side of the vehicle.

The project was launched a year ago with an online hub found at www.fiatmio.cc. People were invited to submit design ideas for the car, whose name translates as My Fiat. Since then, all suggestions have been discussed by others and the best ideas have been trialled by the Fiat design team, along with its own engineers’ ideas. So far more than 11,000 ideas have been submitted by a registered community of almost 17,000 members.


Submissions include an idea to have wheels that rotate 90 degrees to allow for easier parallel parking; cameras instead of rear-view mirrors and inter-vehicle communication to avoid collision.

The initiative flies in the face of conventional car design, which is usually fine-tuned behind closed doors to prevent competitors from stealing ideas.

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Fiat Mio falls under the Creative Commons License, allowing participants to own their contributions, but for the community to distribute, modify and share their ideas.

The company has posted some fascinating making-of videos giving people an access-all areas pass to the car making process, including one that explores how they decided upon the shape of the car one that shows the enormous clay modelling machine at work -- an huge robotic device with a five-axis mechanical arm that mills a huge slab of clay into a full size 3D representation of the vehicle. The video is in Portuguese, but you don't have to speak the language to be able to appreciate the process:


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Many of the final details of the car are undecided, but there are lots of elements still under discussion, such as the propulsion method for power for the car (almost certainly electric, but which type of engine?), the infotainment system, gadget integration, navigational tools, the final materials used in the body, driving aids and onboard biometry.

Some design elements have been narrowed down to a few options, such as the mechanism for the doors. Three options have been proposed, including the conventional method of having the hinge towards the front of the car; inverse opening, where the hinge is positioned at the rear end of the car, and a third option, which sees each door open in a different direction. The driver’s side door would open in the conventional way because the seat needs more distance from the dashboard and steering wheel, and the door on the other side would have an inverse opening to create space in front of the passenger.

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As the countdown on the site now says, there are 71 days left until the Automobile Show and a lot left to do. It will be fascinating to see whether this crowd-sourced approach to car design is an idea that will spread.

Here is a video explaining the background of the project:

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