PHOTOS by Eric Cassée Jay Rogers

Jay Rogers always dreamed of building cars. Now he’s letting
everyone else in on the fun with an innovative new startup.


The Rally Fighter is a beast of a vehicle – a mammoth off-roader, a superhero’s cosmic sidekick ready to flash its four-wheeled fangs at any unassuming compact it flies past. The Rally Fighter is no Chevy Tahoe; Local Motors, its manufacturer, is no General Motors; and Jay Rogers, Local Motors’ 37-year-old CEO, is not your average executive. Rogers is an Ivy League alum whose résumé boasts a tour with the U.S. Marines in Iraq and a three-year stint at a medical device business in China. Yet, all his life, the Chandler resident wanted to build cars.
 
In 2007, after more than a decade of dreaming (and raising $10 million), he finally got there. It was then that he launched Local Motors, an innovative car company with two core missions: Host an online group of car-loving contributors who compete to design vehicles for niche regional communities – Hawaii, the Pacific Coast Highway, the Sonoran Desert – in contests that run about once a month. Then use the winning designs to manufacture and sell vehicles to those communities.
 
Taking business ideas from a community of willing participants is commonly referred to as crowdsourcing, though Rogers prefers a different term.  
“This notion that I give you a contract, and then you come and work for me, and then you owe me, like Rapunzel, your first-born child – that doesn’t work,” says Rogers, a tall, confident and conventionally handsome Princeton grad. “What you’re looking for is giving people tools, education, a network, inspiration, fame, money, and they give you ideas, enthusiasm, feedback, criticism. We call it ‘co-creation.’”

This co-creative community isn’t so complex. Signing up is free on the Local Motors website, and the forums and contests are easy to navigate. Community members aren’t just designers, Rogers says, but range from everyday car enthusiasts to experienced engineers. More than 20 design contests have been held so far, with winners receiving credit for their designs and prizes ranging from cash to design gear.
 
MIT professor and crowdsourcing expert Eric von Hippel explains that crowdsourcing is a powerful tool for Local Motors because it creates a mutually beneficial business relationship: The designers get creative stock in a widely viewed product, and the company gets positive branding as a blank, customizable slate – not to mention free labor.
 

The Rally Fighter was built by Local Motors last December and priced at $59,000.

“There’s a brand new understanding of how the innovation process works and the important role the users play in it,” von Hippel says. “Users are the developers of most new products – not manufacturers.”

The first and only car manufactured by Local Motors is the Rally Fighter, which won a national desert-racing-themed competition in 2008. (Sangho Kim, a 2010 graduate of Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design, was awarded $10,000 for designing the car.) The car had to be a high-speed vehicle able to go off-road in desert terrain, operate in intense heat, have a built-in fire extinguisher and boast a sleek body style.