This week, Windrose founder and CEO Wen Han made heavy truck history by putting the CAD models for all 1,023 parts from the X9D01 base model of his Windrose E700 Class 8 electric truck online. For free.
The Windrose 3D Viewer gives enthusiasts, engineers, and curious lookie-loos a detailed, fully inclusive look at the design and engineering behind the company’s incredibly capable battery electric semi truck – but it also gives someone else, someone much more important, a peek behind the curtain: Windrose’ customers.
And in doing so, Windrose is raising the bar for what customers should expect when it comes to serviceability.
A Class 8 truck works for fifteen years. A fleet buying from a manufacturer founded four years ago carries a risk it rarely states out loud. “What happens to parts supply in year twelve?” Every new entrant has been asked this question and none of us has had a good answer, because the honest answer has always been, “trust us.”
This is a better answer.
WEN HAN
WINDROSE CEO
With the geometry of more than 1,000 proprietary components published online, Windrose’s CEO argues that any competent fab shop should be able to machine a mount, fold a bracket, or fabricate a panel that may be needed for repair.
After spending the better part of two afternoons going over the Windrose 3D Viewer models with an ex-Ford engineer and a pair of high-end tuners telling me the same thing, I’m a believer.
It’s all there
E700 CAD drawing, via Windrose.
The open source move is more than an impressive bit of corporate transparency; it’s a potential game-changer for ownership. If you know how to make the parts you need, you can ensure that the Windrose truck you buy today won’t become an expensive paperweight if the company goes the way of Bollinger, LION Electric, or Nikola. And if the battery packs can be repaired or even remanufactured independently, the potential service life gets even longer, still.
And Wen, to his credit, gets it. “Our customers are not dependent on us being reachable or being responsive, or being here,” he wrote, in a post on LinkedIn. “Our trucks should outlive our ability to support them. This is how we make that true.”
You can read Windrose’ terms and conditions for use of its parts data, below, then let us know what you think of Windrose’ latest bid to gain some market trust in the comments.
Service, repair, replacement parts and modification of a Windrose vehicle: free. No fee, no permission, no notification. That holds for owners, for independent workshops, and for anyone making parts for them. Independent repairers already have these rights in the EU and most US states; we are removing the practical obstacle rather than granting a favour.
Manufacturing vehicles from these designs: by agreement with us. Talk to us and we will be reasonable, but it is a conversation, not a download
Format: native PRT, unconverted, 3.54 GB. A STEP or JT export records final geometry only. The native file carries the feature tree — sketch constraints, driving and driven dimensions, parametric relations, and the order in which the part was built. That is design intent, and it does not survive export. A shop reproducing a part twelve years from now will want the former, not the latter.
Also included: an assembly tree of 1,920 parent-child relationships across 97 assemblies, and a manifest giving part names, systems and per-vehicle quantities.
SOURCE | IMAGES: Windrose.
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