Building your own custom vehicle in under one hour sounds like building something cheap using wood that won’t last very long. Urban Tabby begs to differ. The Italian firm has created the world’s first OpenSourceVehicle (OSV) which can be made in any configuration using a variety of engines and is road legal.
The car comes with the options of an electric, hybrid or conventional petrol engine and can reach speeds of up to 85 km/h. The car can be built as a two-seater or four-seater, among other configuration, depending on the user’s own requirements. The possibilities with the OSV are limited only by the owner’s imagination. The vehicle comes flat-packed in a crate for easy transportation and requires no specialized tools for assembly. Of course there is the fully finished version for the less adventurous. The fully finished versions are expected to cost between $5445 to $8168, depending on seat and engine configurations.
The company plans to make the schematic for the OSV available on the internet for anyone brave enough to build the car using their own materials. “Anyone will be able to create his or her own personalized vehicle: manufacturers, automotive companies, but also designers, makers, and enthusiasts”, says the firm. Up till now, the designs include two and three-wheeled configurations, city cars, golf carts, street food vehicles and off-road explorers. The chassis of the car can be lengthened or shortened, depending on the number of seats or the amount of cargo space needed.
The OSV provides a platform that anyone can modify or improve as they want, limited only by imagination. The plans for the OSV are available on the internet, while the kit itself will hopefully be sold this spring. The car was shown in Milan and was presented by Ampelio Macchi, co-founder of OSVehicle project, with Tin Hang Liu and Carlo De Micheli. So all the engineering minded guys among us have a new toy to play with! Fingers crossed till it is released commercially.
