Turning conventional car-making wisdom on its head, which says keep your designs close to your chest, Fiat has launched a website encouraging the public to submit designs for its next model, the Fiat Mio.
This is not the first time Fiat has called on the public to collaborate. Back in 2006, the car manufacturer challenged Brazilians to come up with ideas for the next 30 years of Fiat vehicles, as a celebration of its three decades in the Latin American country. So impressed was Fiat with the ideas generated, it challenged the public again; this time to come up with ecologically friendly car designs. The Fiat Concept Car 2 was showcased at the International Automobile fair in 2008.
And now the call has gone out once more. A dedicated website (www.fiatmio.cc) has been set up that will act as a forum for automobile enthusiasts to put across and debate their various dreams of what the future of car industry should look like. All suggestions on the site will be trialed and facilitated by the Fiat team, along with its own engineers’ ideas. The resulting vehicle will be showcased at the International Automobile Fair 2010. The project falls under the Creative Commons License, allowing participants to own their contributions, but for the community to distribute, modify and share their ideas.
The campaign is part of Fiat’s push to embrace the digital age head-on. By creating an open forum, it acknowledges that all ideas generated might be used by other individuals, or by its rivals. A bold step that might spell the beginning of the end for closed-shop car design.
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