Pick the Winner

On the famous day of April 1, it is traditional to play a prank on one's readers.









(Fool - eternityroad.info)


Because we are actually launching an important part of our site on this day, it is just as important to know when we are kidding and when we are serious.

Along those lines, here is a simple test to see if you are a reader who has been paying attention.

On Tuesday, April 1, 2008, Local Motors will launch the following on its website:

1) A design service for small African swallow backpacks named "cabinkeys". They are quite fashionable.





(African Barn Swallow - coffecreekwc.org)








(Modular Backpack - Trailflex.com)


2) A collaborative book project detailing both the Struggle For Stability In Early Modern Europe and The History of Citroen, and concluding with the relationship of Cars to the said Struggle.







(Aquaduct - hobbysite.info)







(Citroen 2CV - freefoto.com)



3) A retrospective of different pilots who have claimed themselves to hold land and air speed records: Steve McQueen, John Sharpe, Chuck Yeager, Mario Andretti, and Snoopy.







(Chuck Yeager - rosenblumtv.com)








(Snoopy vs. the Red Baron - Peanuts by Charles Schultz)


4) The first of many monthly Design competitions where Car designers can compete to have their design bestowed the honor of besting the competition, winning cash and prizes, and having the chance to be built into the next great American car.





(Ex-Ta-C Concept - Jonathan Kasumba, LM Charter Member)


5) A Moonraker theme show where designers compete to be the next James Bond vehicle designer.



(Aisun Concept - Victor Uribe, LM Charter Member)


Among these five choices is the "Real Deal". Happy April Fool's Hunting and head to www.local-motors.com to see if you are right!

A Complete Community

Tonight I was cruising around on a couple of design sites (you know the type Coroflot, DeviantArt, etc.) and it occurred to me that someone was missing from their communities.

Design is not only for designers, but rather it is also for consumers, enthusiasts, and especially for those engineers who like to build cars.

Something we have created in the Local Motors Community is a collection of designers and engineers.





(One of the original Designer Icons from local-motors.com)








(One of the Car Builder Icons from local-motors.com)


Just recently Victor, one of our Local Motor's Charther Members, was looking for feedback on his Ferrari concept.

Here it is:








It is an excellent design and he has received 10 "Green Thumbs" and a great deal of design comments. Such transportation desing feedback has been really well received, but it is perhaps not the most special part of the comment stream. What is unique about his feedback on Local Motors community is the commenting he has also received of an engineering nature.

Take, for example, this comment he recently received from another community member, WiKid:

WiKID 1 days ago

RE: Aero; needs a provision for a spoiler or a sharper angle on the rear (ala Porsch Boxster). Transitions just behind side windows and back of the roof are good areas to explore aero features. In general, anything that looks "fastback" generates more drag. The slopes away in front of the rear wheels could cast a large wake, but it's anybody's guess based on how dirty the air is coming off the front tires (which would require a sophisticated CFD model anyway). Biggest aero question in my mind is how you exhaust all the air sucked in by those scoops. I would love to see a rear shot with a provision for engine box exhauster (assuming mid-engine with the aggressive scoops back there) and a diffuser built in. Throw some vents on the top of the rear wheels, and let the rear wheels breath to the back, and most aero guys will have enough things to tweak to make the car slippery enough. Cheers. ::man, I wish there was a way I could load pictures that were examples of all this stuff::

Now Victor can take these engineering and design comments back to the "bank" and return with an improved design that appeals to both the builders and the enthusiasts. Where else can you find such a vibrant and well-represented community of like minded car lovers? Perhaps deep in the halls of Toyota, BMW, and Ferrari, but I'll wager that none of us will ever get to go there....and what's more Toyota, BMW, and Ferrari will never get the breadth of design and advice to be found only at Local Motors.

Go Local!

What is CSHXHAKOFURAI?

We found it today in New York!







CS








HX








HAKO








FURAI

Today Dave and Mike and I did something that we rarely do. We had some float time in our development pipeline, and so we took a ride down to New York and dropped in on the Auto Show.

These four vehicles were undoubtedly the bells of the ball. Each brought a little something different to the party - paint, panels, curves, windshield angle - but each was deeply exciting.

We will probably be talking about them a lot from now on.

Bravo to the companies and prototype development shops that build the CSHXHAKOFURAI's of the world. You inspire us!

What a Community means to Local Motors

Over the last couple of days we have received a number of queries on our commitment to protect designers and their work. We anticipated this concern and that is why I have blogged a number of times about our thoughts on rights and protection. I still consider this one of our most important advancements and cornerstones of Local Motors, so I wanted to take a little time tonight to address it in further depth.






(www.bidburglar.com "Big_Burglar" Circle added)



To paraphrase one of our community member's questions which summarizes a great deal of these concerns into one thought:

In [my country, ABC Co.] organizes design competitions regularly, for very few winners....They receive thousands of free ideas from designers that earn nothing for their job. [ABC] then submits all the ideas to [its own] designers and [uses] some for serial car design. That is the reason why I never show more than one or two views of a vehicle on the internet. Your competition terms require a detailed and scaled design of the car, don’t you think that it is just a new way to make people work for no salary at all ???

Some may think that we would cower at such a pointed question, but actually we see it as an opportunity to put our best foot forward. For instead of being troubling for Local Motors, this question highlights some of the most positive and groundbreaking innovation in our Company and Community.

Do such Companies as ABC host such competitions? You are right that they do, and I really dislike the fear that they have created in the automotive design industry. Take for example the latest guidelines for a major annual auto design competition. I will summarize from the rules:

1) Submit to ABC your design.
2) Only ABC gets to see that work. The designer gets no feedback, and the community (if there even was one) does not get to see anything.
3) ABC alone chooses 30 designs and rejects the rest. They don't even have to send a "losing" designer a letter if he doesn't win.
4) Then a group of viewers and the company votes to choose the top winners. EVERYONE of these 30 designers signs over their rights in their design completely, regardless of what they win ($300 or $6000)
-There is one competition per year and the prizes are about $20K all together split between 30 people.

(www.bidburglar.com "Big_Burglar")


This is SO different than what Local Motors provides:

1) We are building a community that puts the designer on a pedestal. This is not a black box, where you send stuff to us and we tell you only if it is good, and only in our myopic judgment. This is an interactive community where comments and suggestions and voting go on in real time. This feedback is the Most Important Value designers receive from the site. Based on interviewing many designers, we know that this is something that is really challenging, really exciting and something which has not been done before on such a scale. We understand that sharing design is challenging, but the value received from the community ought to far exceed the fear that people will only take and not give. Local Motors will run a competition every month, and pay out every month. Not every year. True, we cannot make every car which wins. We do not intend to, but that does not mean that we cannot celebrate and offer a community for great design. There is of course value that we receive by being in this nexus, but it is nothing that is not loudly declared and nothing that we have not paid for.

2) As for whether we might steal designs. I would first point onlookers to our Guidelines and Terms of Use at the bottom of our website. They make it clear that we have to pay a designer in order to use his design, and even then, we do not have unlimited rights in every case. So we are not taking something for nothing. Furthermore, if we simply decided to be a bad company and steal anyway, that would be a short-lived way to run a company. I give our readers and our community my word (and you will see it is true over time) that we will NOT do this.

3) As for whether the prize is worth the effort for designers. We are running sketch competitions NOT highly detailed 3D rendering competitions. We have (and will continue to) emphasized that doing modeling and photo-realistic rendering in one's competition entry does not give that person an advantage in winning a competition. We are looking for blunt, raw inspiration. So the time spent by a designer in creating a sketch for LM should be measured in hours not in days or weeks. We have calibrated this by studying the average capabilities of designers at one of the preeminent design schools in California. Therefore, if someone wins, for only a commitment of a couple of hours, we offer Status in our Community, prizes, and cash. We believe that is more than a fair trade. Even if a designer doesn't win, he has benefitted from real critical thought and comment, and he still owns his design.

In short, we celebrate all professional and amateur car designers. We intensely dislike the way that design competitions like ABC's have been run in the past. I appreciate all of these concerns, and I hope I have answered at least some the questions. We would love every designer who comes across our site to participate. The more people the more rich the commentary, and the better the cars that result. This is people helping people, and Local Motors is paying to develop the community in which they interact. I hope that the oppurtunity to have the status, to have the comments and votes from a worldwide community, and to earn the prizes we offer is valuable to our believers.

Come and give us a try, you will be pleased. And keep the questions coming!

Thank you

I feel a bit like the following Dominican devotee:










(courtesy www.op-stjoseph.org)


We are now almost 24 hrs into the new life of our Local Motors web-site, and there have been no major system malfunctions. Though this admission is likely to lead to divine retribution in the form of Murphy's law, I hazard to admit that I could not have imagined a more perfect and well orchestrated first post-launch day. Well done team!

While our web team's contribution cannot be underestimated, there is another group to which I wish to call attention; All of those contributors who took the time to update, visit, and register on our site today; quite simply, without you, there is no Local Motors.

I salute your efforts, and if it was not for our commitment to protect your privacy, I would want to share your exploits with all involved.

Go Local!

Very Best
Jay

Going Live

(courtesy of www.k6ese.com)


March 25, 2008

On Tuesday, Local Motors' on-line design and enthusiast community goes live at www.local-motors.com!

The community begins with a heavy emphasis on design as it promises to be a nexus for critique, celebration, and collaboration on automotive body design. This upcoming week is a time for our users to get familiar, to create a profile, and to prepare for the upcoming competition.

Beginning April 1, designers will compete in regular competitions for a chance to see their design on the road. This is no Fool’s Day joke! Car lovers and enthusiasts will vote and comment in support of their favorite designs, because they want the opportunity to drive the design they desire most. Competitions will be based on designing cars for specified cities within the United States, and the cars will be built near the cities for which they were designed.

Come check out the site and Go Local in 2008!

Priming the pump - Driven by Design

Over this past weekend, the first sample entry for a Local Motors competition was reviewed by the team.

Portfolios of work have been building in our beta site from designers across the world, and this entry is the beginning of work actually being designed for our community with the intent that it be built and brought to market.

It is a First, and we are stoked about the power and potential of this design-driven market. The automotive design world has been awaiting such an independent engine, and we are delighted and humbled to see it ignite.

Over the course of the next week we will display such sample entries and further instructions on how best to create a submission, so that when we officially start the first competition on April 1, all of our entrants have the best idea of what is expected by the community in order to be competitive.

For the following work in progress, thank you to Jonathan Kasumba, a Local Motors Charter Member from Uganda!

Enough Already - Where is the passion?

On Wednesday, Richard Wagoner, Chairman and CEO of GM, came to Harvard Business School to talk to a packed house of over 200 people leaving standing room only. During the talk, he stated in no uncertain manner that an automotive startup couldn’t make it. He used Tesla as the example, saying such things as such a startup cannot make it because it requires "large scale…crash testing…pollution, etc”.

These statements were an echo of his last visit to HBS in 2005, when he was interviewed and asked about his thoughts of new entrants into the US automotive industry. I was in the audience at that time, and in answer to those questions he brushed off the concern stating that making real cars was a business for grownup companies, that it was hard to do, and that he was not concerned that a startup could be successful.







(courtesy Truckblog.com)

Both of these events and statements are disappointing for a number of reasons. Are the US domestic automakers successful? Profitable? Considered good employers? Known for making exciting products? Most everyone can agree on these answers. "No". Yet the reason behind the answer cannot be that globally the industry is suffering alike. It is not. Many automakers are growing, profitable, and gaining market share in the face of the domestics' decline. Safe to say that something is wrong at GM, Ford, and Chrysler.

So if startups cannot be successful then, who is to rescue the ailing domestic industry? Are we destined to cede jobs, market share, history, brand, affection, memories, and growth in our economy to Korea, Germany, China, India, Bangladesh? I am by no means a globalization-a-phobe, but I see no reason to roll over and take an automotive beating when America defines itself as a country of high manufacturing productivity and creative business.

Or are we to believe that Richard Wagoner or GM will save the industry? It is not like they have not been trying.

GM has been losing jobs by the thousands and its workers have been suffering cuts of a thousand knives. Many of those workers have a deep passion for American cars and yet they have been forced to move on. Many of them dream of a day when US cars can once again be successful. If given a chance to work for another startup like Tesla, Carbon Motors, Local Motors, or others, many of them would jump at the chance to join up and give it a try. Wagoner does not speak for those hoards of disenfranchised workers anymore. How does he know what they will do with their time? He cannot assume that he alone is the reason for GM's ability to survive in the market. The success or failure of a startup is not pre-destined by the set of factors that Mr. Wagoner suggests. It is my belief that success is predicated on passion for cars more than any other single factor.

Bob Lutz did not make it to his position as the Vice Chairman of GM because he was a good bean counter. He loves cars and he sees to it that beautiful ones are made. We need more of that.










(courtesy GM and Business Week)







(courtesy Corvetteblogger.com)


I find Wagoner's doubt in startups to be arrogant and short-sighted. I recognize as well as, or better than, most people that making cars in America is tough business, but starting a car company is not about crash testing, and pollution control, and large size. If it was, no one would start into it. It would be too boring. It is about passion. It is about beautiful cars that grab you by the gut and make you feel proud as you drive them down main street. It is about the exhilaration of commanding a car through the curves on a winding road. It is about going a little faster than the next guy off the line at a stoplight. It is about the feeling of elation when you first take charge of the keys of a vehicle you have dreamed about owning your entire life. Yes, the details of crash testing, pollution control, etc. are critical factors, but they do not keep you coming to work everyday when the going is tough.

The one thing that Mr. Wagoner discounts when he makes such prognostications is the passion to create a product that connects with customers directly. Starbucks had no chance in the face of Folgers and Maxwell house. Zara had no chance in the face of the Gap. Southwest had no chance in the face of American. Apple had no chance in the face of PCs. Dell had no chance in the face of IBM. But Schultz, Ortega, Kelleher, Jobs, and Dell were all passionate about their product. They like many others were unwilling to accept status quo.

Mr. Wagoner may be right that many start-ups will fail, but when he is wrong it will be because he forgot one critical term in his calculation of what it takes to succeed, and that is PASSION.

Spend a day with at Local Motors, and I guarantee you will get your fill.








(Courtesy Benjamin Louis, Charter Member, Local Motors)

P.E.R.T.: a shampoo or a secret weapon at Local Motors?

OR






(PERT Chart, wikipedia)


PERT:

PERT is a method to analyze the tasks involved in completing a given project, especially the time needed to complete each task, and identifying the minimum time needed to complete the total project.

This model was invented by Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc. under contract to the United States Department of Defense's US Navy Special Projects Office in 1958 as part of the Polaris mobile submarine-launched ballistic missile project. This project was a direct response to the Sputnik crisis. Some US government contracts required that PERT be used as part of management supervision.

PERT was developed primarily to simplify the planning and scheduling of large and complex projects. It was able to incorporate uncertainty by making it possible to schedule a project while not knowing precisely the details and durations of all the activities. It is more of an event-oriented technique rather than start- and completion-oriented, and is used more in R&D-type projects where time, rather than cost, is the major factor.

While the rest of the world was wringing their hands and worrying about how we were going to build a next generation American car company, Local Motors was busy at work completing a two month planning effort focused on getting that job done. On March 5th, we alluded to "crossing the line of departure" in this blog, and now we are ready to give a glimpse of what that process means.

Working with a consultant who originally worked on the Polaris missile project in the US NAVY, for the past 2 months the LM team has used the PERT methodology to organize and plan the discrete activities and milestones needed to achieve our initial prototyping goal, our design community ambitions, and... hold your breath... our first SALES to customers.










(Polaris Missile, Wikipedia)


Now, it is true that we are devout followers of 37 Signals Get Real teachings in which chapter 6 they warn, "No matter how much you plan you're likely to get half wrong anyway. So don't do the "paralyis through analysis" thing." We agree with this teaching, but such thinking must be placed in the context it was meant for - building a web app. For building cars, there are longer lead times and multi-party supplier dependencies where a little bit of planning goes a really long way.

So the long and the short of it, is that we have taken on the bear of sorting out those natty details and questions and on March 5th we put the finishing touches on our first crack at it the plan.

Here is a look:








(a view down the critical path.... hmm red is NOT a preferred color!)










(a "brief" task list)


One of our advisers said "that when we finish this effort - and it will be exhausting - we will collectively breath a sigh of relief because at least a version of the plan and its timeline will be in front of us."

Well, I want to say that that adviser could not have been more right.

<<<>>>

I will now go to sleep and wake up in the morning, recharged and refreshed and ready to take on the items that lay ahead in our plan.

Welcome to new members of the team

As of 1746 EST, Local Motors gained 4 new members to its rank of world class investors. Hailing from San Francisco, Texas, and New York, these investors have continued to diversify and strengthen our small company's base of support.







(courtesy Don Breeden)







(courtesy Wikipedia)








(courtesy Wikipedia)


Having just returned from NYC, where all the talk is about Bear Stearns and the momentous decision of the Federal Reserve to use its extraordinary powers for only the second time in history to shore up a failing investment bank, it is refreshing to be a part of the economy that is not laser focused on financial markets on a minute by minute basis. We know that many in New York (and in the financial markets around the globe) are having the jitters, but we are confidently delivering on our promise to bring new jobs, new technology, and new cars to the Unites States. It couldn't be a better time to build such a business in America.

Welcome to our new team.

Go Local in 2008!

Thoughts from "Designing the Car of the Future"

This evening I found myself in NYC called to action by a colloquium of some of the world automotive design elite on the eve of the New York International Auto Show. What this amounted to was a 2 hr guided discussion, of three top corporate designers moderated by the 'Times' own Phil Patton.










(courtesy of killaclause.blogspot.com)











(view from my seat tonight, of the audience)












(courtesy NYTimes, Times Talks Series)


It is hard to say what I have to say here, because I respect the illustrious careers of the individuals involved and the design achievements that they each have under their respective belts (Pontiac Solstice, Saab Aero X, to name a few)......but






(courtesy General Motors)








(courtesy General Motors)


...... each of these top flight designers left me wondering where their soul was. They presented more about fuel economy and Coefficients of Fluid Dynamics (which one of them admittedly knew little about), and less about design and its inspiration. If I had wanted to go to a lukewarm lecture on corporate platitudes about engineering possibilities and the future of fuel cells, I could have traveled to a different city. But I came to hear about design and to be inspired about the future of it in transportation. For that notion, there was scant little. And what is worse, these gents had all the chops to do it. They each had more skill in the pinky about design and managing design then half the audience combined, but somehow, they couldn't let it roar. Hmmff.

This does not mean that the trip was a failure. In fact, quite the opposite. What it demonstrated to me was the vast inertia that the great automakers have, and how that slow, steady, motion has infiltrated their design studios. This pace has made them exacting and professional, but at the same time slow. Perhaps it is axiomatic that size means sluggishness....time will only tell for us, but I came away doubly invigorated to fight for design AND engineering to be close to the customer to invigorate the consumer/driver/enthusiast in a way not found today in the majors....or even the minors.

We must be nimble,
we must be responsive,
we must take our customer along with us as we educate ourselves,
we must excite to the bone,
we must provide a real lasting product.
If we do these things, we will BE different, and never have to TALK about being so.

I will say that there was one design that left me with a primal stirring. Yes, the Mazda Furai. Designed by Bernard Lee, part of Franz von Holzhausen's Mazda team, and built by Swift Engineering and Aria bodyworks in collaboration with Mazda, this vehicle is the kind of thing that keeps us all scanning the horizon in traffic for something worth dreaming about. Bravo!


(Mazda Furai, courtesy www.uol.com.br)

Lesson from iTunes - Problems with a lack of good image rights tools

In the last few days since our semi-closed alpha launch of Local Motors full website, we have received a constant and intense stream of personal emails asking if we are for real and if we really intend to protect the rights of transportation designers. There are so many sites, people, blogs, videos, etc. today that simply "rip-off" great transportation design that rights have become a large concern.

Rightfully so. Great car designs are not a function of a click of a button on Photoshop or Alias. In fact, it is not even the tools you have at your behest that make you a great transportation designer. It is the guts, vision, experience, excitement, AND skill that allow you to pen a spectacular drawing, and if a stone and chisel is all you've got, it will still look beautiful.

Trans Designers, you rock, your skill is special, and Local Motors has got your back!

So we have spent a HUGE amount of time at the company making certain that we elevate the rights of a designer to the top of our list of concerns. It is our mission to build a site that increases collaboration and speed with a similar increase in the ease of rights protection.

What are we up against? A LOT of friction, and sometimes from places you would not expect.

I was reading a blog post by Michael Galpert from our friends at Aviary in which he rightly argues that until technology makes it seamless and easy to track Rights Royalties and Attributions (RRA), that people will continue to take the "easy route" by just screen-saving proprietary art neither asking permission nor giving attribution.

I agree 100% on this position, and could pile on my own thoughts, but this is a well understood argument. Instead, I thought I would discuss an example of an equally glaring failure that this lack of adequate image rights technology has caused. This is the failure of overzealous legal protections DIS-allowing well-protected communities of great designers into the competitive arena.

For example, in the past year, Local Motors has become involved with numerous schools and associations where a number of great students can be found producing fantastic work at the graduate and undergraduate level. In each case, we have endeavored to make known our company's plan to offer an ongoing forum for competition and collaboration on car design for the purpose of identifying and building a new brand of American cars. When we talk with students, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. They are looking for exposure, and we are pledging the first, legitimate avenue for them to design, collaborate and receive the highest recognition for the work that they do. They design, we pay them, and if their car is selected to be built, we not only attribute their work and pay them even more, but they are let into the inner circle to refine the car AND they get their name emblazoned in the "Pininfarina" place of honor on EVERY car of their design.

You would think that this effort is enough to assuage the skeptics, but unfortunately because we are one of the only organizations coming through the "front door" of these schools and asking students their permission to access great talent and to pay for it, we are met with a huge amount of administrative resistance. Sometimes the resistance is so strong, that you would think we were a third-world mining company hunting for illicit child labor.

The problem is that the powers that be at these schools and associations have no adequate defense against the rampant pirating that goes on and their frustration has built to such a fever pitch, that when new businesses approach them, they unleash with a fury of skepticism. Somehow, we have gotten to a stage that if a company calling card does not say Daimler, BMW, Ford, or similar, that you must be a petty-thief.

I would submit that in some cases, those more well-known calling cards are the one's that a student SHOULD be wary of, not because they are trying to steal his design, BUT rather because they are trying to steal his soul. They want to squash almost every ounce of independent creativity and drive in the name of training to "do it" the way they always have - "Long, slow, and laborious."

Not to fear. We are here for the long haul, and Local Motors has a message for the legal watch-dogs "protecting" great talent:

"We understand your concern and we are here to create a legitimate marketplace for the growth and enrichment of transportation designers. It is organizations like us who are dedicated to righting the debauched state of usage of great design on the internet. We are going to help solve this dysfunction, even if you don't want to help us."

I will leave you, with an analogous story that might crystallize our current state of affairs. Since the days music piracy began on the internet, artists and record labels bemoaned their loss of revenues. When iTunes finally came riding in on a white horse providing a solution that worked for both listeners and artists, it was met with a great deal of resistance. How could they, an upstart computer company, pledge to save the rights of these artists and owners? Well, they did it, and everyone is better off....

I think I will go download some Led Zeppelin on iTunes while we get to work making Local Motors car design site the next great thing in America!










(graphic property of Apple, Inc. colors not original)

Volume and Great Design: Strange Bedfellows...for some

Alfred Sloan is widely credited with changing the styles of GM's car models on an annual basis. This seemed like a great idea, and it was. In fact, it still is. Unfortunately, over time, as volume has grown, cars have become more feature driven and governed by economies of scale and union agreements, and meaningful annual body style changes have morphed into bi-annual, then tri-annual, and up to seven-year events. The desire for style change has been trumped by cost advantages of high-volume.

Were Alfred Sloan and the GM Machine correct in their read of the customer, but incorrect in their assumptions about the market capability of design to manufacturing?

Whichever way you look at it, something has gone wrong because Great Design has suffered under the pressures of our present day notions of Volume. This is our position.

To further explain, this evolution from "rapid design at small volume" to "fewer design changes at large volume" would be sustainable if the customer had evolved in the same way, but we do not believe that they have. In the world of automotive enthusiasts, Great Design is the holy grail of ownership, and design attraction is affected by the prevalence of the model. Have you ever wondered why a Ferrari Daytona grabs your eyeballs every time you see one on the street, whereas a Cooper Mini barely earns a second look these days. There was a day when they both got the same treatment and the Mini turned heads too, but today we have reached the Mini-breaking point. Is it really because the Ferrari design is that much better? Really? Or does it have to do with perceived scarcity?















And, of course, there is the other end of the spectrum where one-of-a-kind cars (home built or commissioned) also do not command a large fascination from customers because there is not a critical mass of like-minded users and so most people cannot see themselves owning one. The one-offs might be cool for a glance but they are made of a special material called "unobtanium" and therefore have a tough time commanding a lingering share of the mind.










Frankly, the customers who crave Great Design are stuck in a Goldilocks conundrum when it comes to volume: too few - no good, too many - even worse, just in the middle - perfect, BUT who can service that need.....













Some manufacturers call that place "no man's land" we call it Local Motors' target market.