X-Prize announced

September 16, 2010 9:01 AM

The $10 Million X-Prize Competition for the best 100 MPG production-capable car has been announced, the winner is Edison 2 Very Light Car at 102.5 MPG.
posted by stbalbach (41 comments total)

And that's with a gasoline engine. So according to the tin hat brigade, this means the team will disappear mysteriously at the hands of petroleum industry operatives.
posted by tommasz at 9:12 AM on September 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

I hear they got the idea from Tesla.
posted by Mr. Anthropomorphism at 9:17 AM on September 16, 2010

The E-Tracer that won the runner up prize looks awesome.
posted by IanMorr at 9:24 AM on September 16, 2010

I am confused. Didn't VW do much better with their 1L car a few years back (1L/100km or 235 MPG on diesel)? This is cool, but it doesn't seem like a huge accomplishment.
posted by ssg at 9:29 AM on September 16, 2010

Tesla Motors are pretty keen, pushing the idea that an all-electric car can be sporty and sexy (how I hate the term for tech in general, and cars specifically, but it's apt). And to hear they're teaming with Toyota to make an all-electric car? Awesome! (Rav4? Meh, but you have to start somewhere).

Here's a quick list of the runners-up, and Pop Mechanics has a gallery of "first-round knockouts," showing more of the cars that were in the running.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:30 AM on September 16, 2010

Didn't VW do much better with their 1L car a few years back (1L/100km or 235 MPG on diesel)?

Yes, but it was a diesel/electric hybrid, which (I don't think) were allowed by the rules. The idea (I think) was to show that production-ready car could be street- and highway-ready, and get 100+ Miles Per Gallon equivalence of gasoline. MPGe = (miles driven) / [(total energy of all fuels consumed)/(energy of one gallon of gasoline)]

Note that the winner of the big prize ($10 million) had to have the fastest time clocked in the Finals Events.

Also: quick comparison chart (with photos) of the various competitors, and NYT Wheels blog: Some X Prize Entrants and Why They Lost.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:43 AM on September 16, 2010

Wow, that's one ugly car. It looks like a track shoe with (four) training wheels.
posted by daniel_charms at 9:48 AM on September 16, 2010

I understand the technology should be more important than the aesthetics, but it's hard to take some of these things seriously when they don't have contemporary design. 100 MPG is great, but what use it is if I can't parallel park it? The little yellow guy looks like a motorcycle with training wheels out the side.
posted by l2p at 9:48 AM on September 16, 2010

Funny how the vehicles are so low weight that having a passenger or two would dramatically hurt your fuel efficiency.
posted by smackfu at 9:55 AM on September 16, 2010

Yes, but it was a diesel/electric hybrid

No, the original 1L car was just a straight diesel and made 211 MPGe. 100MPGe seems like a pretty low bar to aim for.
posted by ssg at 9:56 AM on September 16, 2010

Avion is better.
posted by banished at 9:58 AM on September 16, 2010

It looks like they stole the front iof a cessna and stuck it on wheels.
posted by Navelgazer at 9:59 AM on September 16, 2010

Heh. One of the participating teams was called Illuminati Motor Works and in true Illuminati fashion, they built a vehicle that looks like it drove straight out of the 1930s.
posted by daniel_charms at 10:04 AM on September 16, 2010

2.35 L / 100 Km. Pretty good.
posted by meehawl at 10:07 AM on September 16, 2010

100MPGe seems like a pretty low bar to aim for.

It is about the best 100 MPGe, not just a 100 MPGe. If VW could have won, wouldn't they have entered?
posted by smackfu at 10:11 AM on September 16, 2010

I heard a story about that on NPR this morning. Thing sounds like a freaking lawnmower. I figure one of the things they did to get go 100mpge was take out any kind of sound dampening to save weight.

So, yeah, awesome, but that's only a "car" in the same way that a Trabant is technically a car. It may be fuel efficient, but they've got a lot of work to do if they want the thing to even approximate being street legal, let alone something a consumer not shopping for a go-kart would actually consider buying.
posted by valkyryn at 10:19 AM on September 16, 2010

It is about the best 100 MPGe, not just a 100 MPGe.

I understand that, but it still seems pretty disappointing. The X PRIZE claims to be about "bringing about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity", so it seems like they would set the bar higher than this.

There is an interview that covers the issue a bit at the NY Times.
posted by ssg at 10:24 AM on September 16, 2010

I am confused. Didn't VW do much better with their 1L car a few years back (1L/100km or 235 MPG on diesel)? This is cool, but it doesn't seem like a huge accomplishment.

It's about the "best" car that can attain that mileage. Not necessarily the highest mileage. Presumably there's a technology involved that, for whatever reason, has more potential for practical use than the other entries.

That, or the judges really, really like regression (a shoe with little shoes of its own.)

As for Tesla/Toyota's RAV4, I'm looking forward to it -- it's a terrific use for the NUMMI plant that Tesla just bought from Toyota, and the old electric RAV4s are still around (although a few weeks ago I saw one on a flatbed that looked like it had rolled, or something had rolled onto it -- dunno if it was Ed Begley Jr's, or not.)

tangent: Ed Begley Jr's closed down his environmentally-friendly cleaning supply business, and he donated a huge pile of leftover inventory to the charter school my kids are going to -- and the stuff works amazingly well. It's really a shame the marketing didn't live up to the product.
posted by davejay at 10:26 AM on September 16, 2010

I can't find anything about it online, but this morning the X-Prize contestants were on display on the lawn outside the DC Historic Society, directly across the street from the convention center.
posted by Challahtronix at 11:36 AM on September 16, 2010

I am confused. Didn't VW do much better with their 1L car a few years back (1L/100km or 235 MPG on diesel)? This is cool, but it doesn't seem like a huge accomplishment.

One the requirements is that the vehicle can be produced and sold for a reasonable price. The VW concept used very expensive materials to meet it's low weight and couldn't be mass produced cheap enough.
posted by inthe80s at 11:40 AM on September 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Is it really necessary that all of the high-mpg cars that are created have to have these off-the-wall designs that nobody will buy? Can't a car that's shaped like a regular car get high mileage? For example, take that 235mpg Volkswagen car and make it look like a regular car. Maybe now it's a 150mpg car, but people will be more inclined to buy it. I'd rather have everybody driving high-mileage cars than everybody driving low-mileage cars while super-duper-high-mileage cars languish as prototypes.

Ideally, of course, everybody would be taking the train.
posted by Galaxor Nebulon at 11:50 AM on September 16, 2010

The X Prize is a start, meant to attract investors to build a real commercial vehicle, it's not an end in itself.
posted by stbalbach at 12:37 PM on September 16, 2010

Super efficient cars are always going to be different looking, due to the technical requirement to reduce total aerodynamic drag. Also, keeping weight down is crucial for stop and go driving. Right now, it's totally possible to drive around in a car that gets 50 mpg. But it's still going to be small. My 2007 VW Golf TDI can do it, and it looks just fine.
posted by Carmody'sPrize at 1:03 PM on September 16, 2010

Wow there are a lot of naysayers in this thread. I've been watching this competition since it began several years ago. It really has sparked a tremendous amount of research and development. No, you're not going to be driving one anytime soon. Yes, you're going to see these technologies trickling down into consumer vehicles over the next few years.

As for the inevitable "but diesel engines get better mpg's" comments: diesel fuel is more energy dense than gasoline. It still produces roughly the same carbon emissions per unit energy. (It actually is a little more efficient, but not as much as comapring MPG implies.)
posted by miyabo at 1:32 PM on September 16, 2010

As for the inevitable "but diesel engines get better mpg's" comments: diesel fuel is more energy dense than gasoline.

Yes, all of 10% more energy dense. But if you actually do the calculations, rather than just dismissing different fuels, diesels still do much better.
posted by ssg at 2:37 PM on September 16, 2010

As for the inevitable "but diesel engines get better mpg's" comments: diesel fuel is more energy dense than gasoline.

Well, that, and the Diesel cycle is more thermodynamically efficient than the Otto cycle that approximates modern gasoline engines.
posted by indubitable at 3:25 PM on September 16, 2010

There were actually 3 different winners: List Here

I was a mechanical designer on one of the cars that was knocked out in the penultimate round of testing and I agree with Stbalbach. One of the main goals of the X-Prize was to attract attention and funding to to high mileage cars. Also the rules the cars had to meet to compete were pretty stringent and involved having many redundant electrical disconnects, meeting crash standards, dynamic handling tests and also meeting pretty strict emission standards. All of this means that the finalists are pretty much road worthy cars and with some real funding (designing and building a car turns out to be really freakin expensive) and a bit more design you could see some of these cars on the road with slightly lower MPGe but with more creature comforts. As it was all of the cars had to have A/C, fully road legal lighting and significant crash protection.

As for VW competing it probably wasn't worth it for the big car makers to compete. With a top prize of $5 million loosing or having a catastrophic failure or accident would cost far more than they could ever hope to win.
posted by troll on a pony at 4:28 PM on September 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

it's totally possible to drive around in a car that gets 50 mpg. But it's still going to be small. My 2007 VW Golf TDI can do it, and it looks just fine.

For the record, your 50 MPG of diesel is equivalent to about 45 MPG of gasoline in terms of energy content and environmental impact. This is often forgotten, so I figure it is worth a mention.
posted by Chuckles at 6:31 PM on September 16, 2010

too late.. should have read ahead, I' ma loser, etc. etc.
posted by Chuckles at 6:32 PM on September 16, 2010

I really wonder about the fully faired motorcycle designs (X-Tracer).. In some ways it seems like a very obvious solution for a single person commuter vehicle--obviously lighter and requiring a lot less road space, as much as anybody really needs for average commuting, etc. However, I suspect it will end up being too expensive for what it is (compare to a Smart Fortwo), and it will end up being less safe than a motorcycle.
posted by Chuckles at 6:48 PM on September 16, 2010

"Is it really necessary that all of the high-mpg cars that are created have to have these off-the-wall designs that nobody will buy?"

Americans were buying SUVs in droves till a little $3 a gallon gas gave them a reality check. I wonder if $7 gas will make these cars any more attractive. I like the look of weird stuff like the Ale and MiniCAT AirFlow so I hope these more radical designs start influencing production cars.
posted by Mitheral at 10:47 PM on September 16, 2010

This is a bit of a tangent, but as good a place as any. I think that there is one simple regulation, which the government could implement at essentially zero cost, which would do more to improve the situation with regard to average fuel efficiency, CO2 emissions, oil dependency, and all that jazz, than ten billion dollars would if they were poured into research, or cash for clunkers, or anything like that.

It's this:

Whenever fuel efficiency ratings are advertised or listed, the primary measure should not be miles per gallon but gallons per hundred miles.

Why?

Compare with these 2010 Toyotas.

This car (100 mpg):			1.0 gallons per hundred miles

Prius (50 mpg):				2.0 gallons per hundred miles
Yaris (32 mpg):				3.1 gallons per hundred miles
Tacoma pickup 4 cyl 2wd (22 mpg):	4.5 gallons per hundred miles
Tacoma pickup 6 cyl 4wd (15 mpg):	6.7 gallons per hundred miles

The fuel savings of choosing this car over the common Prius (or of the Prius over the Yaris) are less than half that of choosing one version of a pickup over another-- but people are totally unaware of this, since the difference between 50 and 100 mpg is so much greater than 15 and 22 mpg. But that's highly misleading. If you instead put it in terms of "this is how much gas you'll have to buy every day," people will get it.

More info.
posted by alexei at 12:57 AM on September 17, 2010

This is how it's done in Canada. Well l/100km but same concept.
posted by Mitheral at 1:44 AM on September 17, 2010

Same in Australia, but it doesn't particularly lead to consumers buying more economical cars (well, obviously more economical than the USA, but not even close to UK or EU levels). The top selling car in Aus gets just 26 mpg. MPG to L/100km converter here.
posted by bystander at 2:33 AM on September 17, 2010

How is that any better? The ratios are still the same.
posted by smackfu at 6:00 AM on September 17, 2010

Most people don't think that way. Or at least they don't comprehend that going from 50 -> 100 mpg saves as much money as going from 32 -> 50 mpg or going from 10 ->11 mpg.
posted by Mitheral at 7:20 AM on September 17, 2010

Maybe it would make more sense to just switch to an Energy Star kind of label. "This model's estimated yearly operating cost is $xxxx"
posted by smackfu at 7:37 AM on September 17, 2010

Funny how the vehicles are so low weight that having a passenger or two would dramatically hurt your fuel efficiency

Given that a car is supposed to be a machine for moving people, it seems to me that the right way to measure vehicle efficiency is in passenger miles per gallon^*. Given that present-day cars weigh so much more than people do, driving with a passenger is very close to twice as efficient, by that measure, as having both people drive themselves in the same kind of vehicle. Sure, lightweight cars will drop that ratio some, but the win from putting even one extra body in the car will always be there.

^*or preferably litres per 100 passenger km, since nobody can agree on what a gallon is, or better still MJ per passenger km since we'll all be electric in twenty years anyway.
posted by flabdablet at 8:26 AM on September 17, 2010

I don't think it's practical though, because a 6-seater SUV ends up more efficient than a 2-seater Miata.
posted by smackfu at 8:39 AM on September 17, 2010

Yeah, that only works if you fill every seat in the vehicle every time you drive it.
posted by Nice Guy Mike at 11:00 AM on September 17, 2010 [1 favorite]

alexei: "I think that there is one simple regulation, which the government could implement at essentially zero cost"

I agree. That's why I calc'd this X-Car's L/100Km earlier. There is another quick fix that could eke out reasonable improvement in fuel efficiency almost immediately in all new cars. Mandate that every car, not just hybrids, have an instant, per-trip and per-tank/refill readout on the dashboard. Behavioural analyses of driving with efficiency readouts have consistently shown, since the *1970s*, that with this sort of feedback, a large majority of drivers adjust their driving behaviour to improve their efficiency by a significant margin. The added cost per vehicle is negligible.
posted by meehawl at 11:23 AM on September 17, 2010