Local Motors Launches LM Industries

Local Motors has announced the formation of LM Industries Group Inc., a technology-enabled manufacturer focused on mobility products, headquartered in San Francisco. LM Industries is a “digital OEM” set up to take concepts to deployed products in less than one year. Products are designed through its global community of experts, and then created through technologies such as 3D printing and assembled in small batches at agile microfactories. 

LM Industries creates transportation, accessibility and mobility products with customers such as Allianz Group, Airbus and the United States Marine Corps, by combining co-creation, technology and microfactories into one manufacturing process that builds high-quality, low-volume products at unprecedented speeds. Its efficiency allows products to be upgradeable like software, iterated regularly and fluidly to match rapidly changing consumer preferences. Bringing Launch Forth’s design and Local Motor’s microfactories into one parent company is intended to provide  clients with an alternative to mass manufacturing. 

Allianz is partnering with Local Motors to deploy Olli in multiple cities in order to help accelerate the understanding of insurance in the autonomous world. The global insurer is also designing new mobility solutions and imagining the future of mobility insurance with Launch Forth. Jean-Marc Pailhol, head of global market management & distribution at Allianz SE, has joined the LM Industries board to help guide future product development and encourage strategic global partnerships.

“In the future, a large part of the mobility market will be taken by small factories making solutions near the cities in which they are needed,” Pailhol says. “LM Industries has a real competitive advantage in that they are a step ahead of the other AV manufacturers and have a real value proposition with their microfactories. When I met Jay Rogers nearly two years ago, I quickly recognized the relevance of his value proposition from co-creation to micro-manufacturing to mobility solutions like Olli.”  

The latest project from Allianz and LM Industries is an accessibility device that can be customized to match any activity level or style choices. For the past 150 years, the design of the wheelchair has remained fundamentally the same, with the same benefits and many of the same problems. With limited upgradability and the stigma of a medical device, it is time for a major shift in mass mobility that is inclusively designed with accessibility in mind, but that is also functional and fun for all people.

Other in-progress projects include a modular logistics vehicle and an unmanned cargo system with the United States Marine Corp. The project stands to augment the US military with a much needed responsive capability for vehicle systems development.

"LM Industries has proven to be an agile, adaptive and innovative partner in maturing our hybrid logistics vision,” says Lieutenant General Michael G. Dana, deputy commandant for installation and logistics. “Through the Launch Forth initiative, we are developing critically needed logistical capabilities for 21st century expeditionary operations. By leveraging the power of co-creation, we will rapidly develop time sensitive, demand-driven capabilities for our marines.”

“Our vision goes far beyond ground mobility; our manufacturing process can be applied to virtually any hardware product, from aviation to infrastructure, housing and other large industrial products,” Rogers says. “If Amazon created a new eco-system to monetize the long-tail of ordering things, LM Industries has created an ecosystem to monetize the long-tail of making things. Ecosystem shifts like this come once in a century.”