Startup unveils new open-source electric and self-driving car platform

Earlier this year, OSVehicle, an Italia and Silicon Valley-based company backed by YCombinator, unveiled an interesting new $12,000 open-source hardware platform to develop electric vehicles.

The idea is that the automotive industry has always been capital-intensive and that an open platform could help accelerate the development of electric vehicles.

They are now building on the idea with a new modular electric platform for self-driving.

The new car platform is called ‘EDIT’.

OSVehicle said that they built on the EV platform, TABBY, to build the self-driving platform:

“Despite its simplicity, TABBY started a revolution, empowering entrepreneurs to start their own companies, brands and EVs, but most wanted more. So in 2016, we started working on a new project in stealth mode, crunching all the data and feedback we received. We proudly present you with ‘EDIT’, a data-driven project, based on all the feedback we received from our community.”

They unveil the vehicle at the Santa Clara Convention Center this week in a presentation called “Connected & Autonomous EV revolution”.

Like TABBY, the idea is that companies could take advantage of the platform to build self-driving applications and brand the vehicle as their own.

They list the advantages of using their platform:

1. For most the time to market is too long (even once we reduced it in half with TABBY EVO)
2. The investments of some millions of USD is not feasible for many companies
3. Customizing the vehicle is a necessity, not only for branding but also for specific features for services and advanced ones like connected car and self-driving
4. Services are growing, but most transportation-related services are struggling to be sustainable financially and environmentally because they employ traditional vehicles, vehicles not designed and engineered for their specific services, that often under heavy usage breaks in less than 2 years
5. Self-Driving startups are struggling with reverse engineering and to cost-effectively integrate the newest technology into the closed design of cars already in the market.

Unlike TABBY, they have yet to release the pricing of the vehicle, but they released this video: