The open-source minds behind the Local Motors Rally Fighter have joined forces with Domino's pizza to conceive the Ultimate Delivery Vehicle. And you (or people like you) are the brains that will imagine it.

Domino's is "reinventing the way pizza is delivered, and [they] want your help," according to the official project site. The winning design will earn its creator(s) money from a $50,000 bankroll. The end goal is a brand-new, purpose-built vehicle designed from the ground up with nothing but pizza delivery in mind.

Why? Perhaps Neal Stephenson put it best in his 1992 novel Snow Crash:

"When it gets down to it--talking trade balances here--once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here--once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel--once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity--y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music, movies, microcode (software), high-speed pizza delivery."

Indeed, Mr. Stephenson, though we haven't yet arrived at the full-blown Burbclave era. Perhaps this is the vehicle that will get us there.

The "Design Brief" page explains the process, including the planned phases of the competition:

  • Phase 1: Industrial Design Conceptual sketch and rendering competition
  • Phase 2: Packaging and vehicle layout collaboration exercise
  • Phase 3: Interior design sketch and rendering competition
  • Phase 4: Surface Modeling competition
  • Phase 5: Photo-realistic rendering and animation competition

The project is powered by Local Motors' "The Forge" community interface, developed to connect more amateur designers and hobbyists with companies or backers that could yield new automotive designs.

Local Motors has already collaborated with others in the past, including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on the XC2V military support vehicle project.

We suppose it might be too easy--or too awesome--to just outfit a fleet of Rally Fighters with pizza-warming racks and call it a day, but we'd like to see it.