About Us

The automotive community has always existed.  Whether you’re a Volkswagen nut, a Ford nut or a Vauxhall nut – we’re all in this for one purpose.  It might be to learn, to engage with others or to be that 0.01s faster than the last guy, but we all do it because we love it.

Where it Began

I’ve been working on Volkswagens since I passed my driving test and immediately fell in love with the brand.  Fitting audio, electric windows and generally spending every breathing minute thinking about the next modification.

The problem with some of the modifications was always cost.  There are already products out there that have the features I would want, but I could not afford it.  So instead of trying to save up, I always opted to build them myself.

Sure, there are plenty of products out there with more features, more R&D or smaller packages, but they cost 100x the price.  The products we sell are ones that ones that I wanted to have installed myself, but did not have the budget to have them all. 

The Community & Opensource

I’ve always loved the automotive community.  Back in the forum days, we would all spend countless hours chatting about cars.  It was almost like MSN for car nuts.  We’d share experiences and how to repair and despite the odd keyboard warrior, everyone got on.

And that’s the purpose of Forbes Automotive – to keep that community alive.

I’ve always loved the idea of opensouce – it helps the rapid and ongoing development of concepts and the same mentality extends to our products.  Every single one is opensource – all the enclosures, PCBs and software are all available for download and editing.  There are no secrets.

And that aim of our products is to continually grow a range for people that also share this same mentality.  To the people in their driveways late at night to get that last modification done!

Let’s keep the community going and develop some ideas that everyone can enjoy!

The Difficult Bit

For the most part, the software is written by one person and therefore may contain bugs.  The idea of the community is that people reach out with bugs or issues they have and there is already an implementation or fix for these.  Please don’t hesitate in reaching out, but note that this is not a full-time job and implementation and development may take time.  There should be an understanding and expectation that some cars are unique with differing engine, gearbox or other hardware that may take time to develop and a good understanding of the final outcome should be known.