Crowd funding is all the rage these days. With good reason, too. Levar Burton, Star Trek’s Geordie LaForge and host of the classic show Reading Rainbow, recently had an epic round of Kickstarter funding to resurrect the Reading Rainbow franchise. There are some great automotive Kickstarters out there, but there are also some that aren’t. Today we’re going to take a look at both to show you all what works and what doesn’t. Here’s the five best and worst automotive Kickstarters.
Top 5 Best Auto Kickstarters
Gear & Piston Board Game
Board games are back in a big way. Many successful Kickstarters come from the idea of table gaming. Cards Against Humanity, Artisan Dice, they’re all there. This game promises to be fun while learning about automotive history. Looks fun!
Real FX: Race Cars with Artificial Intelligence
Again with the gaming, Real FX promises an Anki Drive-type solution with some extra advancements. Fully funded and looking like fully good fun, these are something we’d like to play with. On top of that, it uses cutting-edge artificial intelligence to figure out the track and the other cars, preparing your kids to better understand the future robot overlords.
“Hittin’ The Road” with my ART
What’s so special about this artist over some of the ones we feature below? A low funding goal combined with charitable giving back to the community.
Bring the MUSHROOM PATCH ART CAR to Burning Man 2014
This Kickstarter has some key ingredients for success. No, it’s not as awesome as the person making potato salad, but it does have two key words; mushroom and Burning Man. We would’t be surprised to see this fully-funded. Also, the car does look pretty cool.
Hero or Villain Van
Food from a truck is all the craze these days. For our readers who work in Detroit with the Big 3, they’ll soon have a new meal option. Combine that with a reasonable funding goal and asking for donations, and we think they might be on to Motown food truck success!
Top 5 Worst Auto Kickstarters
Exotics Only
Two beautiful women and a bonafide Hollywood stunt driver aren’t enough to get funding for a television series featuring the latest exotic cars. But why? One would assume people like watching exotic cars being driving crazy around a test track. Top Gear works on that premise. But when it comes to funding the risks are always important, and they don’t seem to acknowledge any of them in their statement.
Automotive HDR Book
Gorgeous automotive photography in book format. What’s not to love? In an age where publishing a digital book is relatively easy, and places like LuLu for self-publishing a print version, a $7,500 funding goal seems to be a bit high. It’s a great book idea and would probably sell well to the right audience, but just not to Kickstarter backers.
MedianMag
The idea behind MedianMag seems good; it’s a print magazine for automotive performance in the Northeast. The problem? It’s supposed to be a print magazine in the Northeast. Print has a lot of challenges, and many will argue it’s a dying medium. Then, you limit your audience to a small geographic location. Make it a website, do good SEO, and have some set schedule for publishing and you’ll do fine, for a lot less than you’re asking for in your Kickstarter.
ICON.01 Automotive Prints
Another artist not having their Kickstarter funded. The biggest challenge the author lists is that it won’t be fun living at the post office. In the book The $100 Startup, they talk about a company that makes it big selling unique prints. They did this all for less than $100. That’s far less than the $2,000 asked for here.
Test Tune & Track
These guys want to build a racetrack. Not buy one. Build one. They’re seeking over half a million dollars to rebuild the automotive community. In Tennessee. Their biggest hinderance is insurance and legal disclaimers? Hardly. They’d have much better luck getting a local track to open up for track days.
Kickstarter isn’t going away anytime soon, and there will always be hit or misses on the site. Have one that we missed? Tell us about it in the comments!
Chad Kirchner is a freelance automotive journalist with a sincere passion for the industry and helping people. He’s a member of the Midwest Automotive Media Association and the Texas Auto Writers Association. When not writing about the latest automotive news or vehicles, you can catch him at car shows around the country. Be sure to check him out on social media, including Google+ and Twitter.
