There’s a hidden wish inside every car enthusiast, rooted in childhood fantasy and compounded with each new model that meets the market – the desire to build their own car. And now they can.
Based in Chandler, Arizona, about thirty minutes from the capital, Phoenix, is the micro factory of Local Motors, a start up Inc. for creating and building custom made racecars. The Local Motors Inc. first began in 2007 in a small warehouse in Wareham, Massachusetts, by a man named Jay Richards, a man with a vision to change the American auto industry. Richards had studied aerospace engineering at Princeton University, working for a series of financial firms and entrepreneurial ventures, both domestic and international, before going back to the Harvard Business School, where he was met with the opportunity to present a two-minute business plan in a competition. The Local Motors Inc. plan won Jay first place, and got him started on putting the business talk into action.
Local Motors Inc. works through an online think tank and competition; with the community voting for the design they most want to see. Through this, and the genius of Sangho Kim, then a student at The Art Center College of Design in California, the Rally Fighter, Local Motors’ first and current model, was born.
“I think the idea with Local Motors is to really remind people how simple and beautiful cars are,” says John Domolky, the first Director of Sales and an early investor in the Inc., “That’s one of the keystones of what Local Motors was looking to change in terms of the way people perceive their car. Jay really wanted to bring back the connection and the love between people and their cars that was around forever, really, up until fairly recently now.”
The Local Motors Inc., however, is more than just designing and dreaming up cars, it’s about building them as well. Rally Fighter owners built the majority of the cars themselves over the course of two weekends. And, unless you buy one from another owner, there’s no other way to get a Rally Fighter.
“We want to sort of create that sense of urgency and rarity to get in there and become of the lucky people to get one,” Domolky, the third ever owner of a Local Motors Rally Fighter, explains. “For the Rally Fighter there’ll be 2000 models, but the idea is that each vehicle will be limited to 2000.”
The Rally Fighter was first designed for southwest market and, specifically the Baja 1000 and desert rally racing. Local Motors even has their own team.
We have a Local Motors race team, which sponsors our race car and off road racing,” Domolky says, “I went out for the Parker 425 and we had the infamous flip happen which was a great, well, we were lucky that nobody was injured, but it was a great showcase of the racing prowess of the Rally Fighter and the durability.” Domolky is referring to the race where Rally Fighter flipped tail over nose and landed flat, then just kept going.
If deserts racing, and gravity defying stunts, don’t catch your interest there isn’t long to wait. Word has been circulating around the Local Motors Inc. of micro plants in San Francisco, Boston and New York, all with models aimed at those particular demographics. And even though it takes time to start these new plants with over forty Rally Fighters currently on the road, and more than three new models being built each month, it won’t be long before there’s a turn over for a new Local Motors Production.
One thing all of the models will have in common, however, is their accessibility, and the reliability between car and driver.
“The idea was to have a car where somebody could go off road on the weekend and go out and race and Baja style race or go out to Glamis in CA, out into the deserts with,” Domolky explains. “Go somewhere in their car for the weekend that normal people can’t go. And then come home on Monday and drive it to pick up their kids from school, or drive it to work, or just not have to trailer it. And that’s a huge advantage. And I think it’s sort of the idea I think we’re going to ingrain in all the Local Motors vehicles, that there’s some really special part about the car, but it’s also street legal.”
In addition to being street legal the Rally Fighter is also easy for the home mechanic to work on, an important factor in the Inc.’s mission. Local Motors feels that if you built the car yourself you should be able to work on it yourself.
“I think the idea with Local Motors is to really remind people how simple and beautiful cars are,” Domolky says, “Now there’s just so much technology and so much equipment inside the car that it makes it almost impossible to service it yourself.”
The simplicity of the car is nice to the wallet and, surprisingly, to the environment as well, something Domolky believes is also a large part of the Local Motors movement forward.
“The other message that Local Motors wants to send is that cars can be lightweight and simple and that creates efficiency,” he explains. “So you don’t need to necessarily have the most technologically advanced engine or fuel system or whatever it may be. We’ve been able to achieve significant efficiency just through creating lighter vehicles, and simpler.” The Rally Fighter certainly falls into the lighter and simpler category. Despite its 6.2 liter V8 engine the car weighs in at just 3,200 pounds, accounting for significant gas mileage. In addition Rally Fighters use a vinyl wrap, instead of paint, which prevent toxins from entering the air and help to save on the car’s weight.
“Small decisions like that actually make a big impact on the future, the environmental impact,” Domolky says. “That being said, in the future we may use electric engines, hydrogen engines, all that kind of thing. But the idea is just to keep the concept simple and the design beautiful and from there work on the sustainability angle.”
The Rally Fighter is certainly beautiful in its own right, towering above every other car on the road and zipping around at impressive speeds. It is easy to see how the work of Jay Richards and the Local Motors Inc. may change the face of the automotive industry as we move forward, and perhaps not a day too soon.
“Every time I drive it probably anywhere between 20 and 50 people will take pictures of me,” Domolky says, That’s always fun, but everybody loves it, you know. It’s sort of like if you were driving around in a Lamborghini people won’t approach you. Even a car lover might say ‘oh it’s cool, but it’s not, sort of, accessible’ whereas with the Rally Fighter it has that sort of raw, authentic edge.”
The raw authentic edge can belong to any car enthusiast, anywhere, with Local Motors boasting clients all the way from mad billionaires to home mechanics. All you need is $100,000, two weekends and a vision.