From Wired Magazine,
By Eric Hagerman
Cars are a new arena for the X Prize Foundation, whose mission is to
spur innovation by doling out cash awards to teams that solve thorny
technical and engineering problems. The foundation's first purse was
the $10 million Ansari X Prize for spaceflight; Burt Rutan and Paul
Allen won it in 2004 when their rocket plane made it to the edge of
Earth's atmosphere twice in two weeks. Then there's the Google Lunar X
Prize, which will go to the first private venture to send
image-transmitting rovers to the moon, and the Archon X Prize: $10
million to the first outfit that can sequence 100 human genomes in 10
days for no more than $10,000 apiece (see "The X Prize Ecosystem"). Now the "revolution through competition" model is being applied to energy and the environment with the Automotive X Prize.
The aim of the AXP is to prime the market to demand cars that use
less oil and produce fewer greenhouse-gas emissions. "There's a very
large industrial complex married to an old solution," says X Prize
Foundation founder Peter Diamandis. "If we do this right, we're going
to draw a line in the sand and say all the cars we drove before this
date are relegated to the history museums." Who killed the electric
car? Who cares. Dangle a $10million carrot and watch as engineers
deliver both crackpot schemes and genius innovations, any one of which
could upend the existing automotive industry.
The rules, which will be finalized later this year, have three broad
components: efficiency (cars must get at least 100 miles per gallon);
emissions (cars must produce less than 200 grams of greenhouse gases
per mile); and economic viability (mass production of the cars has to
be feasible, and the company has to have a plan to make 10,000 a year).
It's this last point — that a winning vehicle has to be safe,
comfortable, and ready to be mass-manufactured at a reasonable cost —
that will separate the fantasy-mobiles from those that could actually
be put into production and sold for a profit. "We do not want toys,"
says S. M. Shahed, a Honeywell corporate fellow who, as a past
president of the International Society of Automotive Engineers, serves
as an adviser to the AXP. In other words, a one-off,
carbon-fiber-ensconced motorized recumbent bicycle isn't going to cut
it.
(Aptera's scratch-built car.)