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Meet the Virginia-Built 110MPG X-Prize Car
tcd004 writes "Instead of using Detroit engineers or Silicon Valley bitheads, Virginia-based Edison2 relied on retired Formula 1 and Nascar engineers to build its entry for the X-prize. Relying on composite materials and titanium, the team assembled an ultra-lightweight car that provides all the comforts of a standard 4-passenger vehicle, but gets more than 100 mpg. The custom engineering goes all the way down to the car's lug nuts, which weigh less than 11 grams each. Amazingly, they expect a production version of the car should cost less than $20,000." Earlier today, in a Washington, DC ceremony, Edison2 received $5 million as the X-prize winner. Writes the AP (via Google) "Two other car makers will split $2.5 million each: Mooresville, N.C.-based Li-Ion Motors Corp., which made the Wave2, a two-seat electric car that gets 187 miles on a charge, and X-Tracer Team of Winterthur, Switzerland, whose motorcycle-like electric mini-car, the E-Tracer 7009, gets 205 miles on a charge. Both of those companies are taking orders for their cars."
"Two other car makers will split $2.5 million each"
What does that mean? Does it mean they get $2.5 million each or is it split between them?
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The story at Wired has pictures.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Edison 2 site that would have been linked to in the summary if anyone posting stories gave a damn anymore
Like they've ensured Tesla Roadsters never get to the road, nor the Chevy Volt, Nissan Leaf, or the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd generation of Toyota Hybrids. Oil companies may have been able to get a stranglehold on battery patents before, but the EV genie is out of the bottle. So, go buy one (if it fits your driving needs).
Does it have air bags, side-impact beams, crumple zones, etc? It seems like an impressive bit of engineering, but it will never make it to production in the US unless it meets all the government crash and safety standards.
Safety standards are one of the main reasons a 2010 Honda Civic gets nearly the same mileage in practice as a 1990 Civic. Although the more modern car has made strides in improving drive train efficiency, it weighs over 600 lbs more resulting in nearly the same fuel efficiency. Things like side-impact beams, air bags, and ABS make cars safer, but they also make them a lot heavier.
It looks like they opted for non-scarce materials according to the official site:
The Very Light Car is a more sustainable vehicle. Not just efficient to drive, but cradle-to-grave environmentally responsible. Less mass means fewer material inputs. Energy intensive materials and hazardous or scarce materials are largely avoided in favor of conventional materials, such as aluminum and steel, that are readily available, easily made in volume, and completely recyclable.
First off, it's run on E85. That means it gets something like 50mpg and they say "theoretically" the car gets 110mpg in "gasoline numbers." i.e. if you switch it to pure gasoline, you should get 110mpg by some magic due to additional fuel density. (Imaginary, I'm convinced this won't happen; otherwise why wouldn't you just build a gasoline engine?)
At heart, the Very Light Car is a simple vehicle, avoiding the feature creep that has loaded down contemporary vehicles. Design simplicity, low mass and conventional materials result in lower material costs and production time.
Second, they seem to have avoided "design features" ... I don't see a feature list. ABS? Traction control? (things I don't care about). What about suspension? Is this 4 wheel independent? Rear wheel drive or all wheel drive? A heavy Torsen differential or open? All of these things affect the actual handling of the car and its safety. That whole "My Volvo is safe, I don't die when I hit things!" thing is bullshit; my Mazda3 is safe because I can turn HARD into a 120 degree right turn at 30mph without braking and, with tires screeching and wheels scrubbing, the car won't slip or skid sideways or spin or roll over.
If someone cuts me off on the highway, I can A) take a hit to my front quarter and spin; B) brake hard and get rearended by the tailgater, pushed into him, and spin anyway; or C) brake, downshift, floor it, and steer into a nearby opening. (C) is possible in my car; it was not possible in the Cobalt. In my Cobalt, I actually came off the road in a more gentle curve (still kinda tight, but not a hairpin or corner) at 30mph. The back slid a little bit and I had to fight to regain control. In the worst possible place (narrow roads, guard rails, mountains, and one lane going each way... if there was another car coming I would have had a head-on collision). This is not safe; the SUV I was pacing made it, and my Mazda3 can make it at 60mph+ (I've tested the handling elsewhere; no way am I pushing that car that hard on the street) so I know I'm not going to lose control in normal conditions.
That's what I want in a car. A good suspension, good brakes, good responsive steering, and slap some excellent tires on that bad boy. All wheel drive is excellent, Rear wheel drive is also very nice, front wheel drive ... has proven to be a severe safety hazard (loses control in the snow/rain/ice easily if your tires can't handle it; loses control trying to take off into a hard turn, so don't merge into cross-traffic from a stop). The car is safe, now teach the driver to drive, everything from recovery techniques to road etiquette and proper judgment.
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Does this mean the car can only turn left?
Unfortunately, after the added weight of an average American the car only gets 50 MPG.
They won't.
2010 may finally be the year of 100MPG on the Car!
just make sure it has 5 point harnesses and a roll frame and solid anchor points and you should be able to skip the airbags. Really I don't get the "it's light and made of carbon it must be a death trap" thing. Look at an F1 car, they can crash into a car going 50-100mph slower, flip though the air, crash into a tire wall and both drivers get out under their own power and walk back to the paddock, or WRC cars, toss it down a mountainside and the driver gets out and climbs back up, or Peter Solburg in 2004 hitting a Hinkelsteine and going flipping down the road.
It's not hard to make a safe car, it's hard to make a car you can freely move around in and still be safe when it hits a wall at 70MPH, or another car also moving 55mph(110 wall). Strap the meatbags down and it helps a lot.
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Yeah I like how people blame oil companies, but more typically it's the car companies themselves that cancel projects (EV1, RAV4) or the lack of interest from customer (Honda Insights barely sold at all). No conspiracy needed.
BTW my Insight can get over 100 MPG with slow driving (55mph) and avoiding use of the brake on the interstate. Of course it's only a two seater but that's fine for my daily commute. The best I've ever done was 121 MPG while driving south-to-north across Utah and Idaho.
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Sure, but that's the problem with rules and regulations. Every time you write a law, and entire slew of assumptions get coded in.
What you describe may well be perfectly safe, but that doesn't mean the law still doesn't require airbags, for example.
The NEV article states the safety requirements:
In addition, some states have increased the MPH limit (owner can easily mod this) to 35MPH, allowing them to travel on 45MPH roads in the slow lane:
All of this adds up to a vehicle that is good for local commuting (if allowed on the 45MPH "expressways") and grocery grabbing, with minimal safety requirements and if it's non-emissions, also benefit from tax incentives.
I'm definitely keeping my eye on this, it'd be great for those days when I don't want to ride the bike to work (i.e., have to pick up the kid). The Edison2 car would fit nicely here (though it wouldn't get tax credits).
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So you're saying that despite the fact there are hundreds of thousands of them on the roads, the Toyota Prius is neither practical, affordable, nor does it offer any real and immediate savings to the consumer? And before you come back with some trite answer about it being a smug feel-good car, I've got two words for you to consider: Taxi Cab. If the Prius weren't a winner on all three of the metrics you name, why would taxi companies love the things as much as they do?
As for the Edison2, it's a cool concept, but it's still a concept. The thing exists as a one-off prototype with exactly none of the real-world production hassles and economics worked out. It therefore fails your three metrics by default.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
The current glass in cars (for windshields) is SAFETY glass. Essentially, the glass itself is fragile on purpose, and the polyvinyl butyral in the middle only serves to hold the glass fragments together. The glass is supposed to disintegrate when faced with large stresses, but remain stuck to the polyvinyl butyral film. Plexiglass simply will not offer the disintegration behavior, as its designed for the exact opposite purpose and will not disintegrate.
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I have not done the math on most of these vehicles, but I recently did on the Leaf after looking at their display at the California State Fair. Dollar per mile, the Leaf couldn't even come close to the fuel costs compared to my 1999 Suzuki Swift. It's purchase price, even after accounting for inflation isn't even close either. Yes, the Leaf probably has 10 years more worth of safety features, but that doesn't account for it's poor TCO. No doubt it is a better value in those magical parts of the country that I keep hearing about on Slashdot where they pay only $0.10/kwh. Here in California, we can be paying over $0.30/kwh.
I'm on real time metering via ComEd in Chicago. At night, I pay as low as $0.01/KwH. It is extremely cheap for me to charge my Tesla Roadster at night.
And before you come back with some trite answer about it being a smug feel-good car, I've got two words for you to consider: Taxi Cab. If the Prius weren't a winner on all three of the metrics you name, why would taxi companies love the things as much as they do?
Ha! Have you ever met a New York cabbie? Because I sure haven't, and I'm assuming that there's never been a bigger bunch of hemp-wearing tree-hugging kumbaya-singing hippies. With disposable income.
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The truth is that weight mainly affects acceleration, outside towns, while aerodynamics affects fuel consumption rather more. That's why the latest hybrids have such interesting shapes, especially around the rear end where the airflow detaches from the body.
As a real world, example, the Econetic Ford Fiesta is now available in the US, meeting full US specs. It produces 120BHP, more than European versions, but the NYT review mocks it for its low power and suggests it is slower than a rowing boat. That's nonsense, but it's the sort of thing rednecks like to believe. It does about 40MPUSG. It would have been hard to achieve that in a 1990 Fiesta, which would typically get around 28-33MPUSG. Yet it is much safer and much faster.
To be blunt, the real problem for economy cars in the US is the US mindset, which so often sees mere size as better than quality engineering. The mindset won't change until gasoline reaches about $5 per USG, and given the number of AGW-deniers among the current crop of Republican candidates, and Koch funding of the Tea Party, it's more likely someone will get invaded for their oil first.
Sorry if this is a bit of a rant, but my point isn't anti-US. It's complaining that the US has many of the world's best engineers who could fix all the problems of peak oil and overconsumption - but their own countrymen won't let them.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
If that were true don't you think one of the over 100 teams who spent millions of their own money would have done that? Its easy to get 100mpg when you gloss over all of the details and rules, but the X-Prize setup many tests to ensure the car actually got 100mpg in many scenarios. Your alleged PM 100mpg car may not even be true.
"While it isn't terribly hard to build a vehicle that will propel itself 100 miles on only a gallon of gas, the X Prize rules call for a car that can carry four adults and sip gas while traversing all kinds of terrain and negotiating real-world traffic. And the car builder must demonstrate that the vehicle can be profitably offered for sale in volumes of 10,000 units in a form that meets federal crash safety and emissions requirements. If this weren't enough, the competition really is a race, because the money goes to the fastest car that can do all of these things."
http://www.xprize.org/news/automotive-x-prize-seeks-100-mpg-car
, I'd avoid it if I could, but the fact is that when I do leave a space that would allow me to stop if they went from 60-0 in 1 second, another car passes and gets in that gap.
Then you should back off again. Arriving alive is the goal, it's not a fucking race track.
why weld? just form/machine the parts and then bolt together, see "billet aluminium car" by kirkham motor sports.
Machining is the most expensive way to produce a metal part. You start with a block of metal and grind away everything that isn't the part. It's very wasteful, in terms of energy, even if you recycle the waste metal chips. The cheapest methods are stamping or casting. Guess how most metal car parts are made?
Robotic welding is cheap, repeatable and produces strong assemblies. Bolting tends to be labor intensive, and adds more weight (bolts weigh more than welds).
It's not like the existing car companies haven't analyzed these alternatives more than a few times over the last 100 or so years.
Putting moderation advice in your
That's a particularly lopsided view of the "oil conspiracy." The reality is that oil companies represent the single largest caucus of industry money with a single purpose: sell more oil. They brought those resources to bear against the California Air Resources Board (CARB) in order to end the public's mandate for zero emissions vehicles, even the smallest amount, which killed electric car development in it's infancy. I remember seeing electric RAV4s and EV1s and Ford Ranger EVs buzzing around in the late 90s in rural Georgia. The technology developed by GM was mothballed by Exxon Mobil, who bought and buried the battery technology. Toyota continued to develop theirs, and now they have top selling hybrid car in the world.
The red herring offered consistently is, why wouldn't GM want to lead the way in electric car development? Two reasons: one, EV technology was receiving zero subsidy after CARB was bought and sold, yet gasoline in the United States is sold at a fraction of the price due to massive subsidies by the US government. The second is that electric motors are hideously reliable, as evidenced by hydroelectric dams that have been in operation for over one hundred years. If a material for infinitely durable shoes was developed by Nike, do you think they would be dumb enough to manufacture and sell it?
It's tough to continue netting billions if you make your product cheaper and more efficient, without being able to drop the price enough to sell it to more consumers. So, as one would naturally expect, you fight any newer technology with every tool you have, while simultaneously buying up the competition and burying new technology. An oil company actively reducing the value of their trillions of dollars of oil infrastructure is like Microsoft funding R&D for open source software. It just doesn't happen.
Eventually the new technology will win, if there is some other industry that will see gains, or if the government steps in to make sure the economy isn't artificially shackled to old technology because of monopolistic business practices. It's fashionable to call that Socialism, but everyone else calls it progress.
Sounds like deregulating your electric system really worked out for you then.
Seat ibiza gets 97.4mpg and it's a real car:
http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/carreviews/firstdrives/237415/seat_ibiza_ecomotive.html