That's an interesting consideration, and it's worth thinking through. What happens when it does become possible to download and print cars? Who will still design cars if designs are not protectable? Hobbyists? If that's the case, will they be any good? You can point to top-notch open source software, but so much of it became really good only because some company figured out how to monetize it. Maybe some company will figure out how to monetize digital cars without charging for the designs. It'll probably be worse than just paying for the designs (e.g. advertising). Or, maybe nobody will figure out how to monetize it, like open source games, and the results will be crap.
And even if hobbyists do design say sports coupes, will they also design say minivans? If they don't, that's a market failure--there is a demand for minivans, and people capable of designing minivans, but no way to monetize the designs hence no minivans.
I do not think that 3d printing is really the game-changer that people think that it is. You can already make things at home, even copying industrial designs. For example, lots of people seem to be concerned about the implications of printable guns, but making your own guns can already be done with a surprisingly modest collection of machining tools, and done better with those tools to boot. Much more accessible and popular, you can copy clothing patterns with modest sewing skills and equipment that you can pick up at nearly any yardsale. (In fact, if I am not mistaken, DRM has already reared its ugly head in some particular niches of fashion...). I would even go so far as to say that printing your own car will be unpopular/uncommon for the exact same reasons that sewing your own clothing is currently unpopular/uncommon (it will be labor intensive, take a lot of space, and acquiring the correct materials will be a chore).
My hope would be that everyone keeps a level head about 3d printing and thinks before going nuclear^W legal.
In answer to your question "What happens when it does become possible to download and print cars?": barring hyperactive lawyers overreacting, probably very little of any consequence.
current amature manufacturing tech is way below par when copmpared with industrial manufacturing tech.
When downloading digital media, the reproduction is perfect, and takes no effort. Current home kits for making things are far from perfect, and takes a lot more effort in comparison to digital media reproduction. This is why 3D printing hasn't really taken off. When the day you can recreate a perfect car/bike/toaster like the one you buy from a shop, printed at home with a click of a button, then you'd see the car manufacturers sueing people for laser scanning their model/designs and uploading it - just the same as the media conglomerates doing so right now.
When the masses can perform what used to be the domain of the specialists, the specialists would necessarily have to disappear.
Home production will never be as sophisticated as what can be achieved in a factory. Anything that can be done in a home can also be done in a factory, plus some.
Lets think about this though, how are you going to print a vulcanized rubber tire? How are you going to print an engine block, a car body, and a windshield?
Okay okay, lets say that in some sort of manufacturing singularity we can print all of those things... cars are still big, and this printer is going to be big as well. Where do we do this? In my garage? Well, I don't have a garage, I have a shared parking garage, but lets say I had a two car garage. One space for the printer, one space for the car. Printer prints all of my parts, I assemble (okay, perhaps I have robots (printed? themselves robot assembled?) strong enough to assemble it), fill it with fluids, and drive off into the sunset. Was all of that equipment used to print and assemble it generic? Do I have other uses for car-building sized printers and robots, or is that just wasted space in my garage now? Do I grind all that stuff down into printer food? How long does that take? How long did that stuff take to print in the first place? How long did my car take to print? Hell, where did I even get the material to build all of that stuff in the first place, and where do I put the printer food when I'm done? Do I order up a few tons of steel and have them come back a few weeks later to pick up the barrels of steel chips when I'm done?
This all seems pretty intensive just for one car, but there are some obvious improvements that can be made. For instance, instead of doing all of that work for just one car, I could print out two cars instead. Setup/demo time would be the same, so it would be more efficient. Now I don't need two cars, so maybe I could sell one of them to my non-hypothetical self who doesn't have a two car garage in the first place. Hell, we can even do better than that still; my neighbor Joey doesn't really feel like clearing out his garage (his printed model trainset is in the way), so I'll print and sell him a car too. In fact, maybe I'll print one for the whole neighborhood... maybe I'll rent out some larger space than my spare garage space to do this, get a few production lines going in parallel...
Oh shit, I just re-invented the wheel.
3d printers will take off, but they will nevertheless not represent a threat to the concept of centralized production. Only profoundly incompetent companies will be threatened. Any other company that resorts to lawyers will be overreacting.
The question is how much capital is required to start. At the moment, you need to either be a huge corporation or (like Tesla) market yourself well and get a ton of investors to start making cars.
If the price of building a small factory dropped enough, maybe your local library/school would have an open factory space where people go to print custom cars.
If you don't want a custom car, it'd probably be cheaper to buy one though (partially because the availability of such printing would force manufacturers to drop prices).
> You can point to top-notch open source software, but so much of it became really good only because some company figured out how to monetize it. Maybe some company will figure out how to monetize digital cars without charging for the designs. It'll probably be worse than just paying for the designs (e.g. advertising).
So, you'd rather pay for Unix than be stuck with the way companies of monetized Linux? It's not always about monetizing the product as it is about monetizing the complementary service or product.
