The battlefields of Iraq are not the most obvious place for an American entrepreneur to come up with a way to reshape the car industry. But the patched-up oil fields of the war-torn country caused then-US Marine Jay Rogers, an infantry company commander, to opt out of the military and pursue his passion for making greener, more sustainable vehicles.
Rogers enrolled in Harvard Business School after his tour of duty, where he met fellow student Jeff Jones. The pair would bounce ideas off each other while on training runs along the Charles River in Boston, and an official business plan was born "over a ginger ale and a packet of peanuts" on a flight three years ago. With it, Local Motors was conceived, an innovative take on car design. In effect, every design aspect at the motoring company is open to its online community. It currently has 4,000 budding online designers, who pitch their own ideas in competitions to design specific aspects of a car - from its name to its chassis - to win cash prizes.
And that same online community gets to vote on the winner each time, which, one would think, would have some puzzling consequences. But Local Motors' first creation, the Rally Fighter, is anything but ridiculous. Aimed for off-roading in the desert, it boasts a sleek, aerodynamic shell, with its frame raised high above its wheels. It does as much as 6.5L/100km in full competition trim and it all costs a relatively meagre $50,000 (Dh183,650), a third of the starting price of most of its other rivals in Baja competitions.
The first cars will roll off the production line in June from a micro factory in Phoenix, Arizona, some way away from the company's Massachusetts headquarters. In all, Local Motors plans, in the long-term, to set up 50 micro factories across the United States using local blue-collar workers and local products wherever possible, hence the local message in the firm's title. For Rogers, his passion to set up his own motoring company goes a lot further back than his posting to Iraq in 2004 during a six-year stint with the military.
His grandfather was Ralph Rogers, who developed the US's first diesel passenger car in Detroit and took over the Indian Motorcycle Manufacturing Company at the end of the Second World War. "My grandfather brought me up talking about the car industry and, early on, he lost every penny he had in the industry," says Rogers, "so I was aware of the pitfalls. In fact, you don't start a car company if you're totally sane - you have to have a passion for it."
Rogers' recurring theme is sustainability, in the lightweight materials that will be used to build the Rally Fighter, and aerodynamics, in terms of the shape of the car, which he believes sets it apart in one of the least-green motoring markets, off-road racing. "I felt while in Iraq that, in the US, there was too much reliance on oil, and global warming started really heavily weighing on my mind," admits Rogers. "So I opted out of the marine corps and thought, 'what could I do to make a difference?'"
In short, Rogers hopes to set up miniature production lines across the US to help local communities, but also to cut down on the travel times of transporting vehicles. The Rally Fighter will only be sold in a five-hour radius of its Phoenix factory, and the same will be the case for future car creations for Local Motors. Also, the production line will be on a relatively miniature scale. Just 2,000 Rally Fighters will be built - there are plans for 40 in year one and between 300 and 500 in the subsequent five years.
The local element will also go one step further in the whole sales process. Customers have to put down a $99 refundable deposit to have a car built and, four months before that car is built, they have to stump up a $5,000 deposit and the remaining $45,000 balance when the vehicle is finally complete. Head of sales Sarah Stokes is intent on making the whole buying process as interactive as the design was.
"Each car will take two weeks to build and individual buyers will be able to come in on both weekends of that build to get involved and get hands-on," she explains. "Also, the car wraps will all be individual, so we're happy for our customers to run a competition on our site to get a wrap designed and they can decide on the prize." Already, 42 people have signed up to buy the Rally Fighter and, according to Stokes, the buyers vary massively.
"I'm not sure what number of them are actually people who got involved in the design process," she says, "but there certainly doesn't appear to be an average age for buyers. They just tend to be off-road enthusiasts who are excited by the project." While the Local Motors motto means, for now, the vehicle is very much a US-based project, the company could yet go further afield and already has a massive international following.
As much as 40 per cent of its online community are from outside the US, with a major following in the Middle East, although Local Motors has no immediate plans to export its first vehicle. "We're happy for people to come over from the Middle East as a buyer, get involved in the whole process and then ship the vehicle back," she says. "It's just that we don't have experience in the export area and it's not something we're planning to currently get involved in."
Local Motors boasts just 13 employees to deal with its 4,000 online members, who received as much as $10,000 each for their winning designs in the Rally Fighter project. And Stokes admits that she, Rogers and the rest of the team were "genuinely blown away by the standard". She says, "When you do something like this, of course you get some bad ideas, but the designers we've seen are all about improving themselves so they keep on coming back, and some of the designs they come up with are truly incredible."
The Rally Fighter is the first in a long line of cars that Local Motors has planned. Boston Bullet and Miami Roadster are others that have already undergone early competitions, although both are still some way off from existing. The whole process from inception to coming off the production line is about five years, which still makes it quicker than the large car companies and their production lines.
The Rally Fighter itself uses a 3.0L twin-turbo diesel powerplant from BMW's 335d. It weighs in at a relatively lightweight 1,400kg and is set to have a rough top speed of 131mph. In addition, unlike most other off-road vehicles, it will also be street legal. And for Stokes, who is tasked with selling the vehicle in and around Phoenix, she believes its overall lure should be enough to shift all 2,000 models in no time at all.
"We exist because we believe it is extremely useful to get a valuable group of enthusiasts working together like this in one community," she says. "Without them, we don't have a design and we don't get a car out - it's as simple as that. And the subscribers we have so far seem to love it. We're confident it's the future for car design." motoring@thenational.ae