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.

Comments

Re:Key concepts

[clem]

Is there a market for super efficient cars that look like tampons with wheels?

I suppose if you drove through a lot of tunnels it might be of interest.

Changing percpetion

[EmbeddedJanitor]

There are a few things that probably need to change to make this work. First off, there's a macho intertwining of cars with manhood, power etc. Many cars can easily beat a Prius hybrid on fuel economy, but not high performance cars.

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.

Re:Changing percpetion

[Kadin2048]

People really need to see cars as transport. Perhaps then they will start to think in terms of efficiency etc.

People really need to start seeing clothes as something to prevent their reproductive apparatus from freezing. Perhaps then they will start to think in terms of the material and energy required.

In other words: good freaking luck. Cars have been more than transportation for as long as there have been cars. Before there were cars, people had carriages and teams of horses, the perceived quality of which was a sign of wealth, status, and taste. It's been like this probably since the dawn of humanity, with various things.

People will accept some sort of standardized, generic "people transporter" in lieu of a car, right after they all go to wearing standardized jumpsuits with built-in underwear, because hey, its only real function is to keep you warm, right? Who cares what it looks like. Ain't gonna happen.

Re:Changing percpetion

[Dr. Eggman]

Sadly, Ford prototypes of this car proved only mildly successful.

Re:Changing percpetion

[Virtual_Raider]

I beg to differ. I live in Australia, you would hardly call that a densely populated area, and while the natives complain somewhat about their transport system when compared to Europe, it is awesome. And they do have train stations and light train that does connect very remote cities because like they say here, its a bloody long way. To absolutely anywhere. I agree that not everybody wants to live in a big city, that happens to be the case here. So they build excellent and comprehensive train systems to connect everything. And they have clean gas-powered buses that travel the freeways too, that's how I commute to work. I don't know where you pull that prohibitively expensive claim but if these guys can do it with their dollar being eighty cents US, I adventure the hypothesis that it can in fact be done. It is, again, a matter of perception. Aussies believe they want this, so they go ahead and build it. People from the US believe they want cars, so they build automobile-centric infrastructure.

I do not say one is better than other (although I do like Oz better in that regard), I just say that in order to do things differently you have to see things differently. One thinks one wants a muscle car that looks like so-and-so because one has been told that. No, wait, hear me out. You have been told you want that car, because the companies that produce it invest millions of dollars in advertisement. There is marketing research devoted to finding a way of presenting us a product in a way we will find attractive so we ultimately buy it. If the whole industry shifted overnight to emphasizing fuel economy and advertised that, you wouldn't change your mind overnight with them. But eventually you would.

Just think it through. Why do you like, say, a 300ZX? Let's say its because its "cool", and "powerful" and "sleek" and "modern". But how did you come to attach those characteristics to that particular model? Because the industry strives to portray it in a particular way. You will read about it in magazines that those corporations sponsor through advertising. You will see rich and beautiful people paid to drive them. And they will be young and active and will display all sorts of characteristics that an everyday person associates to success and desirability. And they will use clever sound design, clever wording, whatever. The point of this rant is to say that society influences an individual's tastes. Some more than others, and one big way the general public knows something is desirable is because they way they are told it is. If car manufacturers decide to start pushing a new paradigm, if they chose well their target audience, they will make it happen. Not because they have powerful mind-control machines but because we are social animals and very easily hearded. Or I could just be full of hot air, your take =)

sorry to troll, but...

[TheSHAD0W]

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?

Re:Better X-Prize

[Harmonious Botch]

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.

VW have beten them to it already

[farmerj]

VW already have a concept 1 litre car. The 1 litre refers to the fuel consummation of 1 litre per 100 km. Now for the non metric people here this equates to 235 miles per US gallon or 282 mpg Imperial.

More pictures and info here and here. Now this is a two seat car, and if you follow the links above, you'll see not the most spacious.

VW also produce a 3 litre car, the Lupo. The fuel consummation here is 78 miles per US gallon or 94 miles per Imperial gallon and this car is in production, and will hold four people and a wee bit of luggage.

With this in mind, does this competition sound like its really pushing the envelope?

Metric

[SimonInOz]

Sorry to mention this, oh strange American folk (I'm in Australia), but generally, fuel consumption is expressed in lt/100km.
So that's 2.3lt/100km.

You know, my eight year old Hyundai Excel, four doors + hatch, air conditoning, carries my 4 person family about quite effectively, gets 5.5lt/100km (43mpg). I measured it for some years (it varied from 4.5 to 6.5). I don't even try that hard. And it's half way there.

I am stunned to learn the average American vehicle gets 21mpg, or 8.9 lt/100km. Gosh. Do they have special oil burning jets out the back or something?

We'll fix that right after we get cold fusion.

[Kadin2048]

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.

How about diesel?

[Joce640k]

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.

Re:Light != dangerous

[maxume]

When you give a car with an internal combustion engine 'reasonable' acceleration from 50 to 70 mph, you pretty much give it the ability to go 100 mph. If it has a gear that is efficient at 60, it will be able to go 90. You could add gears instead of displacement, but that's more expensive, only works to a point and makes the car more likely to breakdown.