The Open Source Car

I have long held a notion that the concept of an open-source car would be one that would be very appealing to a wide and varied audience. It's blue sky thinking of the highest order for a variety of reasons (mostly legal!) but a concept I would love to see taken forward by some brave manufacturer. However, with the recent economic gloom having hit the automobile industry particularly hard, I doubt it will be any time soon.

My dream is simple in theory - I would love to have a car where the car's systems could be monitored, adjusted and modified easily. My dream would be to have the ECU, engine management system, performance levels, fuel economy, power ratio, acceleration curve etc. become 'tweakable' via some form of mobile or desktop app or wi-fi link to your pc. The capacity to do this clearly exists already where many recently released cars have a variety of settings that can be adjusted by the driver to counter various situations.

For example, the much heralded Bugatti Veyron can be adjusted for 'top speed mode' by using the ignition key to unlock a lower ride height, less spoiler assistance etc. The Honda CR-Z has three driving modes selectable via a button on the dashboard including Normal, Econ and Sport allowing you to tailor your power usage and economy to the road conditions or your mood allowing you to extend the vehicle's range or oomph at the press of a steering wheel mounted button. The beautiful Nissan GT-R has a computerised dashboard designed by Polyphony Digital of Gran Turismo video game fame that looks like something out of the Space Shuttle and can download telemetry data to a usb key for later analysis.

I realise that this dream could remain that way, especially with the legal implications of allowing the lay person the capacity to tinker with their car. Insurers would have heart attacks over the implications of this capacity being built in to a car but it would be cool to see people able to enhance and modify their cars the same way they tweak and mod their desktops and mobile phones. You could imagine people sharing their own 'car profiles' for other users to download and try out on their own car to see if they like the way it makes their car 'feel'.

A tantalising glimpse of this integrated future and people's interest in adding these features to their cars is already a reality with many people using ODBII Bluetooth sensors to analyse their car's engine codes for relatively little money. The popular Bluefin remapping device allows drivers to add power to their car's engine and can add better fuel economy. Even the modern smartphone is in on the act with excellent apps such as the Torque apps from Ian Hawkins and heads-up display apps such as Speedometer. The ability to better integrate our modern phones with our cars would go some way to addressing my dream.

However, the light at the end of this tunnel is Ford Sync. Ford are clearly market leaders on the tweakable car computer system with their excellent Sync software affording a variety of innovative controls to the humble driver. The system links with your mobile to offer standard hands-free calling etc. but can also read sms messages, send replies, control the vehicle's performance, link with your favourite apps - it's a very clever system and hopefully it will spur other manufacturers to do likewise. The ultimate hope would be that many will use Android/Linux as its base OS enabling us happy hackers to finally enjoy some in-car tweaking.