Project blog: The first four months

Electric cars - Now! project started without any strict decision. Someone just said that "if we only had that 500 first subscribers in Finland, we could start the mass conversion of EV's right away". The idea is to use mass consumer power to get reasonably priced quality electric cars to the market as soon as possible. Then came the idea of the market research / questionnaire.

The questionnaire opened 7th February 2008. Within 10 days we had had 300 people announcing that they were interested in buying an all-electric car if available. The 11th day we had a call from Norway, the biggest electric vehicle retailer of Scandinavia laid down an order of 300 cars as well. But we as an open source community are not the producer, we are the initiator, the R&D team, the organizer and the catalyst for the market expansion.

Quite soon it became clear that this concept could work internationally as well. So far we have kept this project to ourselves within the heavy language barrier of Finnish native speaking people. We have felt that the project hasn't been ready enough to expand and not ready to claim it's world-wide plans.

Today we are laying some of it out, yet recognizing that there is nothing outside Finland we can control or want to control. It would be just impossible to run "a conversion show" outside the country where one is located. We just want to share our experiences and knowledge.

So far, our community has used wikidot.com services which has been an optimal solution for a start. It is so easy to use. When we are considering expanding the project to be multinational and multilingual, something more sophisticated system is needed. We have decided to move the system under Drupal, which is really an umbrella of integrated open source platforms to run various heavy web services. Under that system, it should be possible to do world-wide joint purchases of various EV parts. Other goal is to build a systematic and uniform library of EV conversion documentation.

But these are just dreams at the moment. Currently there's a lot of work to do with the conversion planning, finding the right suppliers, devising easy-to-follow purchasing system for the consumer etc. I believe though that the interest towards this project will continue to grow and at some point it will cross national boundaries. Then, we will be happy to share our dream.