Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised May 31, 2026

Open-source car

An open-source car is a car with open design: designed as open-source hardware, using open-source principles.

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May 31, 2026
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Wikipedia ↗
Joe Justice, founder of Wikispeed, presenting the cars' modular design source ↗

An open-source car is a car with open design: designed as open-source hardware, using open-source principles.

Automobiles

Open-source cars include:

Completed and available to build, with link to CAD files and build instructions:

  • OSVehicle Tabby: Tabby is the first OSVehicle: an industrializable, production ready, versatile, universal chassis.12
  • LifeTrac tractor3 from Open Source Ecology has build instructions for most revisions4

Concept stage:

  • Rally Fighter, an all-terrain vehicle by Local Motors uses a design released under a CC BY-NC-SA license. The design was made piece by piece by an open community in a forum. Several units have been manufactured and sold.
  • SGT01 from Wikispeed
  • OScar: started in 1999, still in concept phase as of 2013.
  • Riversimple Urban Car: The CAD models for the Riversimple Hyrban technology demonstrator have been released under a CC BY-NC-SA
  • Common, Dutch electric car (2009)56
  • eCorolla, an electric vehicle conversion
  • Luka EV, an electric car production platform which first car is the Luka EV.7 Only Mrk I & II are open source, the source was closed in July 2016 to allow commercial production of Mrk III
  • Google Community Vehicle, a multi-purpose mode of transport. It can be used as a farm vehicle that attaches to farming equipment or as a means to transport the produce. This car was created by an Indian team for the 2016 Michelin Challenge Design, "Mobility for All International Design Competition"8

Self-driving car prototypes have collected petabytes of data. Some companies, including Daimler, Baidu, Aptiv, Lyft, Waymo, Argo AI, Ford and Audi have publicly released datasets under more-or-less open licenses.9

Other open-source vehicles

Many open-source vehicles come in the form of velomobiles, like the PUUNK,10 the Hypertrike,11 the evovelo mö1213 or the Atomic Duck velomobile.14

Other open-source vehicles include the Xtracycle cargo bicycles.

See also

See also

  • Modular design, subdivision of a system into smaller parts which can be independently changed
  • Kit car, an automobile sold as a set of parts
  • Right to repair, legal right to freely modify and repair products
  • Velomobile, enclosed human-powered vehicle "bicycle car"
References

References

  1. Bruce Sterling. "Tabby, the Open Source Vehicle". 2013.
  2. "Ampelio Macchi presenta Tabby, il primo scooter ibrido a 4 ruote in open source" ("Ampelio Macchi presents Tabby, the first hybrid scooter with 4 wheels in open source")
  3. "LifeTrac – Open Source Ecology".
  4. "Lifetrac genealogy".
  5. Kevin Hall (14 July 2009). "'Common,' the opens-source car that anyone can design".
  6. "c,mm,n". Archived from the original on 21 February 2013. Retrieved 6 February 2013.
  7. "Luka EV – MW Motors"
  8. "2016 Michelin Challenge Design: Indian Team Wins With The Google Community Vehicle – Overdrive". overdrive.in. Retrieved 14 December 2015.
  9. Adi Singh. "Open source holds the key to autonomous vehicles". 2020.
  10. Alexander Vittouris, Mark Richardson "Designing for Velomobile Diversity: Alternative opportunities for sustainable personal mobility" Archived 16 September 2012 at the Wayback Machine. 2012.
  11. Hypertrike
  12. Derek Markham."It's a Tricycle, It's an EV, It's Another Solar-Electric Velomobile!".
  13. Glenn Meyers. "Evovelo Head-Turner: Solar-Electric mö".
  14. ""Atomic Duck velomobile"". Archived from the original on 27 May 2017. Retrieved 27 May 2017.