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X Prize For a 100-MPG Car
Heinen writes in about the X Prize Foundation, which spurred innovation by offering US $10 million for the first privately built spacecraft. The Foundation now plans to offer millions for the first practical car that increases mileage five-fold. The specs for the competition are out in draft form amd call for cars in two categories that are capable of 100 MPG in tests to be run in 2009. The categories are: 4-passenger/4-wheel; and 2-passenger/unspecified wheels. The cars must be manufacturable, not "science projects. The prize is expected to top $10 million. The X Prize Foundation says that so far it has received more than 1,000 inquiries from possible competitors.
It's possible to make cars that are 'manufacturable' that meet this, the real problem will be making cars that are manufacturable... AND sellable.
Is there a market for super efficient cars that look like tampons with wheels?
To get good fuel economy probably needs a mindshift away from SUVs and Hummers towards smaller 1300cc or smaller cars.
The "look" of cars is pretty much fashion driven, dictated by the car manufacturers to promote consumption. This year it's round headlights, next year square; boxy Hummer look one year, curved Porche look the next; big grill, then small.
Car manufacturers keep advertising more power, size etc (10% more power than last year's model, 5% more space...). How is it that they never advertise reduced consumption (well they might, but only if it does not compromise power, size etc)..
People really need to see cars as transport. Perhaps then they will start to think in terms of efficiency etc.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
SpaceShip Two is gearing up for private space flight as we speak. It has been less than three years since the X-Prize. Personal spaceflight is not an easy process, you shouldn't expect it to be commonplace tomorrow.
I read the internet for the articles.
IMO this contest is looking for a milestone in a direction we may not want to go. On the surface it may seem worthy, but new technologies may be making internal combustion engines obsolete in the next decade, and I can't really tell whether the contest rules will take these advances into account. How would one judge a vehicle powered by a hypercapacitor, or by compressed air? You're comparing apples to oranges by merely judging the equivalent energy used to power the vehicle; the ultimate cost of stored electricity may be a lot lower per joule than that in refined petroleum, or it could be higher. How does one judge the total carbon emissions for that electricity? Was it generated by a coal-burning plant, or by nuclear? Or wind, or sea?
The problem with the X-prize was that all the money was in first place. When Space Ship One won it, there was no financial incentive for the others to keep going. ( I've seen the same thing in chess tournaments - the lower prizes are significant enough to keep people from dropping out )
It should have been something like 1st = 10 mil, 2nd = 5 mil, 3rd = 2.5 mil, 4th = 1.5 mil, 5th = 1 mil. Yes, it costs twice as much, but it gets more than twice the benefit: instead of one company producing results, three or four, maybe five do.
Why do you need huge acceleration and top speed? You're using your car for transport, not racing. There's no need for a car that goes more than 70mph. There's no need for a car that burns rubber.
I use a very old technology 1300cc car (probably equivalent in power to a more modern 1000 cc engine car). It has sufficient guts for my purposes, even when carrying 4 people + a load.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Essentially we're getting 100mph for the transport, but the wanger extension is what is giving us 20mpg. People talk about safety etc, but really these are hedges against speaking the real reason; the perception that Real Men drive Hummers with gunracks, only faggots drive 1100cc Noddy cars.
I'm not quite buying your simplification, though, either: how do you account for the 59% of car purchases made by women? What's their issue, penis envy?
While it may be popular these days to try and pin all the country's (if not the entire world's) ills on a bunch of redneck, white, male, gun-toting, Hummer-driving, "flyover state"-ers, I don't think that reality backs that up. Your typical car buyer is female, and is looking for safety, performance (acceleration and handling, which in many people's minds is intertwined with safety), style, and somewhere significantly further down the list, environmental impact and fuel economy. While the guy driving a Hummer may make a nice target for ridicule, there aren't really enough of them to really matter compared to the legions of people driving mid-market cars which really don't have much in the way of a "penis factor" going for them.
Gas just doesn't cost enough for people to care more about mileage than about style. And to be honest, even if it went up by an order of magnitude, while you'd see cars become more efficient, I doubt that you'd really see people changing their fundamental views very much. We're not really talking about anything that's developed recently here; the same forces are at work today with cars, that led people a century or two ago to buy matched sets of horses to pull their coach. Two thousand years ago, there were probably Romans ogling each others' chariots -- when you have something that represents such a large investment (as personal transportation devices almost always are, regardless of the era), they almost automatically become status symbols.
If we ever get cars that on average get 100MPG, it'll be because the cost of fuel is $10 a gallon; even then, there will still be Hyundais and BMWs, econo-boxes and performance machines, minivans and maybe even a Hummer or two, because that's what people will want and have always wanted.
Given the choice between trying to change a deep-rooted social behavior and solving the technical problem of making a minivan/Hummer/whatever that gets 100MPG, I'd say the technical problem is far more feasible to solve.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Most SUVs, especially truck-based SUVs, are much less safe than normal passenger cars. A low center of gravity plus properly designed crumple zones to absorb energy will always fare better than a tall rigid design like an F150. Even better, smaller cars are more maneuverable, providing "active" safety (the ability to avoid an accident entirely) rather than "passive" safety (the ability to walk away from an accident). The only thing making SUVs "safer" than average passenger cars is that everybody bought into the BS that SUVs are "safer". It's become an arms race, and if you don't have a jacked up monster then you risk decapitation if a SUV hits you from the side.
Crowding has nothing to do with it. In fact, in a crowded situation a smaller care may be even safer because it gives you the ability to squeeze into smaller areas for avoidance that you wouldn't otherwise be able to.
That's exactly the point. Cars crumple to absorb energy that would otherwise transfer into your internal organs. Your best bet is to learn how to drive and avoid such situations in the first place. If you can't handle that, you really shouldn't have a license in the first place.
It's not mandates that make fuel efficiency a big selling point, it's the taxation of gasoline.
And once the US government figures out that taxing gasoline would be a great way to pay for the war on terror
One of the big problems is that Americans insist on high torque engines at low revs.
Gasoline engines simply doesn't work that way. You end up with gas-guzzling five liter V8s.
Diesel does work that way. It'll double your gas mileage with no noticeable difference in the car.
No sig today...
We need better designed cities, not better designed cars.
Cars are certainly the most flexible way to get around. But we should not have to use them for our daily commute through rush hour traffic or even for running most common errands or to go out and play or dine out.
The problem really is with the way we (esp. the US) design cities. Instead of spending money on public transit-oriented communities, it's much, much cheaper for the municipalities to just pave a stretch of concrete and let individual citizens pay for the cost, maintenance, and operation of personally-owned vehicles. On top of that, condo construction here is pretty lousy, whereas if single family home construction is lousy at least your immediate neighbors are farther away from the noise.
Unfortunately, we don't really have a simple way to measure how much energy people can save in cities with alternative transit as opposed to people who live in cities where they have to drive even to the nearest postal mailbox.
In the mean time, the exciting progress in the transportation field ought to be things like transit oriented design:
http://www.transitorienteddevelopment.org/
http://www.carfree.com/
Progress in these areas of urban development will get us closer to constructing sustainable colonies in space than any improvement in individually run cars.
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