Designing a car from scratch has long been an amusing mental exercise for automotive hobbyists, or a quirky team project for undergraduate engineers at places like MIT or the University of Pennsylvania. But, Germany’s Markus Merz wants to go farther, he’s the brains behind the OScar project, a vastly ambitious plan to design and build automobiles using open-design principles.

“I believe in the basic need of the individual for mobility, but not the way the automobile industry is fulfilling that need from an environmental point of view,” Merz told NewAssignment.Net. “There is space for innovation in this field.”

For Merz, the process of collaborative design for aluminum and rubber is no different than for Linux and Firefox. Or, as Merz would have it, “hardware” over “software.”

“It’s about being modular without having too many modules,” Merz said. He’s broken down OScar’s design to six such modules: Board (the drivetrain), Body (chassis), Engines, Power, Safety, and Information Systems. Once the coupling points are agreed upon, design for each module can run independently. And as a bonus, a modular design allows the theoretical OScar driver to swap parts as needed, easily changing a passenger car to a pick-up truck.

That’s the idea, anyway. OScar is perpetually mired in “the early conceptual stage.”

“We haven’t frozen the design. We’re still trying to bring the right people together,” Merz said. So far, close to 2,000 people have signed up on the OScar design boards. Consistent with other open-source projects, Merz estimates about 90 percent of those people just watch the site, 9 percent post occasionally, and a core 1 percent of the group is active in moving the project along. For an idea Merz first came up with in 1999, he now says — “I hope to have it complete in my lifetime.”

With open source software, contributors have the instant gratification of seeing their work validated and bundled into a rollout that’s quickly distributed to millions of users. With hardware, particularly something as complex as an automobile, the slowness and “will anything ever come of it?” perception can create an uphill battle. But the difference between designing a car and designing a browser might not be as big as people think. “Every car manufacturer tries to keep the design strictly virtual for as long as possible,” Merz said. “There’s nothing new in what we’re doing.” Once the design is complete, he’d market it to manufacturers.

Whether we’ll ever see OScars on the roads is an open question, but as a social experiment in open design OScar may teach lessons to other, more modest open source projects.

“The hardest part is finding the right people to work on something bigger than themselves,” Merz said. But Merz still believes that collaborative input based on free will and good intentions is a superior design model to profit-driven companies who appoint executives to set tasks and enforce deadlines. “If you compare 1999 to now, I’m a little more conventional in terms of structure,” Merz said. “But I still don’t think a boss needs to be a jerk.”

Eric Krangel is a student in the journalism program at Columbia University. His work has appeared in numerous papers including the Chicago Tribune and the New York Sun.