For those unaware, I've been stewing about a kit car project since I got turned on to it via facebook advertisement right around mid-September 2011. At that time Mark Smith was both founder and owner of Factory Five, but was branching out to start his own new breed of fast and fun diesel vehicles. Go Green. Go Fast. That was the motto that eventually panned into G3F. Of course the only realistically priced diesel donor vehicles of large number is the VW Jetta/Golf platform. The project has been through the planning, fabricating, and pre-production phases for several years now, but when I found it, he was still taking beta orders.
As a "beta," you're really helping in some way to develop the car and find all the snags that other builders will go through when they do theirs. Mark's large 50-beta launch really has probably only a handful of true betas. I'm in the late 30s to early 40s, which basically means almost everything has been tweaked and modified from the original plan to better work with all the available models in any given situation. It's basically a full-production batch of parts. So what's my role as a late beta? I'm sharing my build experience with the world of interested parties and hopefully helping to finalize some input on the build manual. Feedback is key in this industry. You don't want to be selling hundreds of kits per year that all suffer from the same snaggles. Better to work those out early to give everyone a nice clean "easy" and enjoyable building experience.
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