The overthrow of a fully globalized, century-old, $9 trillion industry is fraught. Shrinking cars from 5000 lbs to 1400 lbs raises important safety issues that have yet to be fleshed out. Scaling up and speeding up 3D printing to become something more than a sideshow is an unsolved problem. And no one is really sure whether 3D printing at scale will be much greener than existing techniques. (Laser sintering, for example, uses about 40 times more energy per kilogram than aluminum metal working in mass production.) A regulatory tousle also awaits the first carmaker to update their car on the fly.

Local Motors

When I describe the idea of collecting your next car from a local printer to Mark Stevens, a manufacturing expert at the nonprofit Center for Automotive Research, in Michigan, he bursts out laughing. “The idea that you can print a car on demand! It’s not going to happen in our lifetimes,” he says. His problem is with how it might scale. “A traditional assembly line could make a hundred vehicles while they print one.”

Divergent’s Kevin Czinger acknowledges that “our single biggest challenge is getting carmakers to work with us.” He hopes to sign a joint development agreement with a major car manufacturer next year for a new vehicle, much more mainstream than the Blade, to sell 10,000 or so a year.

The fate of the Urbee — Jim Kor’s diminutive podcar — may be instructive here. His small firm was unable to hit X Prize deadlines and ended up dropping out of the contest. When he did finish the Urbee, the two-seater electric/ethanol hybrid blew past X Prize goals, achieving around 200 mpg on the highway. The organizers of the X Prize were so taken that they pushed Kor to start a company. But after chasing funding for a year, he couldn’t raise the money he needed. Kor now thinks the best way to get Urbee onto the market is to license his designs to other manufacturers.

Local Motors’ Jay Rogers, meanwhile, would like to emulate Apple’s new iPhone upgrade program, where users pay a fixed monthly fee for access to the latest handsets. “We’re going to change these devices so fast that it’s better if you don’t have customers thinking of them as owning them,” he says. “I want to be the first person to put an autonomous vehicle on the road for customers to buy. Then the next month I want to have the next sensor that will make it even better. And the next month I want the next battery, and on and on and on.”

There is an obvious problem with this. As much as additive manufacturing might shorten production times, cut emissions and costs, and eliminate heavy machinery, cars are not reducible to software. There is a large physical presence that has to function efficiently and safely over many years in the real world. If a windshield wiper fails or a poorly-designed battery overheats, you can’t update them over the air.

How, for instance, might a small, distributed company like Local Motors develop something as complex as self-driving systems, and then keep them working perfectly on a range of vehicles, no two of which might be exactly alike? Rogers, true to form, suggests turning to the crowd: “What if I give a hundred people in my community the first version of these cars, and challenge them to help me develop faster?” he says. “We’ll say to the community, develop the crash avoidance software at the speed Waze developed traffic avoidance software versus Google Maps.”

In return, users might get gamified incentives like points or early access to new vehicles. They might even receive a payment if the car sells well, although Rogers insists that he will “invoke Wikipedia rules instead of Google money. We will give you pride.”

How regulators might respond to automotive software developed under the Wikipedia ethos is also up for debate. “Companies still have to solve the problem of how to make every car different and yet all of them proven to be safe,” says Lonnie Love. “I can’t predict when that will happen. It could be 5 years from now, it could be 50.”

But if there’s one thing that Silicon Valley likes, it’s an idea that starts small and cheap, annoys regulators, and harnesses the power of the crowd. Building a car factory today is a multi-billion dollar, once-a-decade decision for a multinational. Setting up a $20 million microfactory in the future might require nothing more than some innovative vehicle designs, a few entrepreneurs and a hefty bank loan. Car production could become local — think many mini-Detroits — serving purely local needs.

“Playing in the gaps between the product lines of major manufacturers isn’t a limitation but a liberation,” says Rogers. “Making several thousand units a year at a microfactory becomes meaningful because if you can make money and make happy customers doing it, you can engage a whole community.”

Traditional car makers are also slowly waking up to the benefits of 3D printing, initially to replace factory tools and fixtures made from expensive, resource-hungry metal. Luxury marques like Mercedes, Cadillac and Lexus were quietly working on automated driving systems like adaptive cruise control and lane departure warnings for years, only to have their thunder stolen by self-driving upstarts from Google and Tesla. The automotive industry is keen not to get left in the dust again.

3-D printed car that Local Motors debuted in November.

Meanwhile, additive manufacturing is evolving at Silicon Valley clock speeds. If 3D printing technologies continue their rapid improvements in speed, cost and energy usage, if new software tools can democratize design and testing, and if regulators and the public embrace the coming Cambrian Explosion in vehicle diversity — many if’s, to be sure—the result will be an epic confrontation.

The advocates of 3D-printed cars return time and again to the argument most compelling to them: that additive manufacturing can be an order of magnitude more energy-efficient than traditional practices. That alone might drive its adoption, though its benefits are not only in being less bad. A drop in production efficiency is offset by a gain in the pace of invention. It can only be a matter of time before we see the first Kickstarter for a passenger car. “I think a whole industry can be built up around rapid innovation in transportation,” says Love. “And that is revolutionary.”

Photographs by Liz Kuball for Backchannel.