HILUXURY – Hawaii Luxury Magazine

Photo courtesy Local Motors

Local Motors offers guests a chance to create the Rally Fighter automobile, which was inspired by the P-51 Mustang fighter plane.

Watch your own car come to life in this fantasy getaway

IT’S ONE THING TO BE ABLE TO BUY a hot new luxury car. It’s quite another to delve into a total “ownership experience.”

Automotive company Local Motors offers car enthusiasts the chance to see and interact with an actual car’s creation. For an estimated cost of $50,000, Local Motors offers the Rally Fighter experience, which takes guests to a “micro-factory” in Phoenix, Ariz., and allows them to work with builder trainers in the step-by-step, part-by-part construction of the Rally Fighter vehicle.

“Our customers end up with a deeper understanding of the vehicle, which we believe will result in deeper enjoyment,” says Sarah Stokes, chief sales officer at Local Motors. “These are folks who want to understand their car from the inside out – what better way to do that than build your car with us?”

The Rally Fighter is one of the first cars to come out of Local Motors’ innovative, community-based counter-approach to the current mass production of automobiles. According to its mission statement, the idea is to produce limited quantities of environmentally friendly, yet efficient and safe vehicles in smaller, localized factories. The Local Motors Web site offers design contests where industrial designers, engineers and car experts can submit original car plans. Based on feedback from Local Motors’ “web community,” winning car designs are given cash prizes, and have the potential to be manufactured in real life.

These design contests often are based on catering an ideal car for the culture and driving needs of a specific city or region. Several car ideas have already been selected for cities such as Boston and Miami. Local Motors also has displayed a car design for Hawaii called the iBite – it has a Toyota Prius Hybrid Platform and two surfboards as part of the body panels.

The Rally Fighter was designed for driving and off-road desert racing in the American Southwest. Created by Sangho Kim, a 2010 graduate of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, the car was inspired by the P-51 Mustang fighter plane. Among its features are an inline six-cylinder 3.0L sequential twin turbo clean diesel engine (425 lb-ft of torque and 265 horsepower), a tubular steel space frame with bonded, fiber-reinforced shear panels and manually adjustable ride height. It can seat four adults, or two adults and three kids. A fully manufactured Rally Fighter premiered at the 2009 SEMA show in November, under the “Making Green Cool Zone” – it runs at 30-36 miles per gallon.

The Rally Fighter is the first car to actually be produced from Local Motors’ design contests. Recently, another competition was held to create different “skin” designs for the car, further showcasing the impressive range of ideas in the Local Motors web group.

“The results of this competition are proof of the talent of this incredible community, and this is only the beginning,” says Local Motors CEO Jay Rogers.

The process of building the Rally Fighter takes two weeks. In the Rally Fighter experience, six days are asked of the client to be involved. During this time, the future Rally Fighter owner engages in ground-up production, with hands-on involvement in everything from installing the rear and front axles and suspension on the chassis to connecting the car’s emergency brakes and placing the seat belts. Each experience is professionally videotaped. The whole process fosters a common bond between Rally Fighter owners as they acknowledge their place in that uniquely tight circle.

“The idea of opening the doors to a production automotive facility and crafting a program to allow customers to build their own cars may sound simple, but it hasn’t been done before,” Stokes says. “This alone is unique.”