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2009 BMW Rally Custom
via hotvvheels

This is so pretty.

This is NOT a 2009 BMW Rally Custom.

This is the Local Motors Rally Fighter.

It is powered by a BMW 335d, 3.5L 6 cylinder Diesel.

That is the only thing BMW contributed.

This was specifically designed for Baja style rallies held in the southwest US.

This was designed and engineered via crowdsourcing by Local Motors a company based in Massachusetts. They are very prevalent on Twitter and I have had the wonderful opportunity to talk to several employees, including the CEO Jay Rodgers.

Learn more about Local Motors at http://www.local-motors.com/

There was an article in Wired about them.

Jay Rogers, CEO of Local Motors, saw a way around this. His company opted for totally original designs: They don’t evoke classic cars but rather reimagine what a car can be. The Rally Fighter’s body was designed by Local Motors’ community of volunteers and puts the lie to the notion that you can’t create anything good by committee (so long as the community is well managed, well led, and well equipped with tools like 3-D design software and photorealistic rendering technology). The result is a car that puts Detroit to shame.

It is, first of all, incredibly cool-looking — a cross between a Baja racer and a P-51 Mustang fighter plane. Given its community provenance, one might have expected something more like a platypus. But this process was no politburo. Instead, it was a competition. The winner was Sangho Kim, a 30-year-old graphic artist and student at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. When Local Motors asked its community to submit ideas for next-gen vehicles, Kim’s sketches and renderings captivated the crowd. There wasn’t supposed to be a prize, but the company gave Kim $10,000 anyway. As the community coalesced around his Rally Fighter, members competed to develop secondary parts, from the side vents to the light bar. Some were designers, some engineers, and others just car hobbyists. But what they had in common was a refusal to design just another car, compromised by mass-market needs and convention. They wanted to make something original — a fantasy car come to life.