Cool Video: 3-D Printed Car?

These Cool Videos show how Local Motors is making a drivable car with a 3-D printer. By car, we are really talking about the chassis, seats, door panels, and thousands of other parts, but not the engine and wheels.

The car will have a few dozen parts rather than the tens of thousands of parts in the modern auto. I have re-posted other 3-D printer video stories here, here and here.  This is has the potential to be a major disruptive and transformative technology, which is rapidly developing.  

I am also fascinated by it because it capture s another thread that is woven in my analysis, outside of the capital markets.  Capitalism is about relationships, which is why some object to Picketty and the modern use of capital to be equivalent to wealth.   Capital is an expression of a social, political and economic relationships.

Just as the resolution of the Great Depression helped facilitate (don't need to posit cause) a change in various social relations (e.g. men and women, citizens and the state, employer and employees, private and public, self and other, hierarchies and networks) so too as the Great Financial Crisis is resolved social relations are being transformed.   

The new technology in various parts of our lives is increasingly allowing us as individuals to take greater control of our immediate environment,  By this I mean, we can listen to the music we want in the sequence we want.  We can watch shows when we want.  We can do the same thing with news and opinion.   

At the same time there has been our productive capacity has grown and transformed:  From cottage industry, to small batch, then mass produced.  From going to get parts to  bringing the parts to workers (assembly line) to constant flow production, the process has evolved.

These two threads are woven into a modern fabric, which I have suggested is customized mass production.  So I was quite happy to hear one of the people in the video call what they are offering as a "mass customized" product.  Of course, at an earlier point in the evolution of relationships, these two concepts were thought to be opposites. Now they are a meaningful together.  

In case you cannot see this other video (below), here is the link from Business Insider.