I love crowdsourcing but have always been suspicious of its limitations. It’s great for developing a brilliant idea, but can it really ever come up with the brilliant idea? Could it turn out the next iPod? From CNN, a report from SXSW about the first automobile to be designed by crowdsourcing:

“With its orange paint, muscular look and mounted steer horns, an unusual race car has been turning heads on the streets of this capital city.

But that’s not even the most interesting thing about it.

This is a Rally Fighter, believed to be the first production vehicle to be designed through crowdsourcing, the process of drawing input from a global community of interested people via the Internet.

‘If Henry Ford had had Twitter and Internet access, he surely would have made his automobiles in a very different way,’  said John B. Rogers, president and co-founder of Local Motors, the Arizona car maker that built the Rally Fighter. The company’s slogan: ‘Made by you in America.’

Rogers spoke at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin on the use of crowdsourcing to make the best possible automobile in the cheapest and most efficient way.

Local Motors claims that its Rally Fighter is the first vehicle in the world to be created following this principle. Rogers said it was produced in 18 months, about five times faster than through conventional processes.

The design was chosen through a 2009 vote by a community of hundreds of people on the Internet.”