A pack of cleaner-driving cars is rolling into auto shows around the world, but organizers of the Automotive X Prize want them to save more gas and go faster.
They plan to stage an ambitious contest, and entrants will compete on a multistage course wending across varied terrain around the United States. But the prize backers also want to see these cars move into city traffic and seek homes on driveways, so another prize requirement is that the companies involved have a well thought out business plan.
"We want practical vehicles in the near term," is how Don Foley, executive director of the auto prize program, put it.
The competition, slated for a formal debut today at the New York International Auto Show, is a sibling of the ambitious Ansari X Prize that spurred the 2004 launch of a private manned space shuttle. But instead of targeting space travel, the prize founders have their sights set on earth-bound transport technologies that linger tantalizingly close to commercialization.
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| FuelVapor Technologies, a Canadian company, is working on this 3-wheeled sports car for the X Prize. Todd Pratt, the company's vice president, says it hopes to tweak the car's fuel efficiency up to 100 mpg by this summer. |
High-performance hybrids, hybrid plug-ins, pure electric cars and advanced diesels are expected to make up much of the field. Most are using technologies similar to those of the "concept cars" that major auto companies have showcased at a roundup of shows in Detroit, Japan and Germany over the last two years but have yet to roll out in big numbers (Greenwire, Jan. 14).
The new X Prize takes a slightly different form than the space race. That contest was an open-ended challenge to launch a privately funded shuttle into orbit. This contest, Foley said, will be structured so that all the participants have a deadline determining when they will have to hit the road. The winner will take home a prize purse of at least $10 million.
In an attempt to bring designers' dreams down to earth, entrants in two categories, mainstream and alternative, are required to submit documents to the Automotive X Prize group that show their car designs are "production capable" and can meet a slate of minimum requirements.
Draft contest rules, published for discussion among the auto community, propose that vehicles be required to go at least 100 miles per gallon of gasoline, or the equivalent in a different fuel like ethanol, diesel or electricity. To assure a level playing field, they would be required to emit no more than 200 grams per mile of carbon dioxide throughout the fuel's entire well-to-wheels life cycle. Acceleration and speed standards will assure that the vehicles can handle U.S. roads and highways.
In the mainstream category, cars will likely be required to carry four or more adult passengers in air-conditioned comfort while keeping four wheels firmly on the ground. The alternative category leaves more to the imagination, with a proposed requirement of carrying two passengers on any number of wheels.
"One of our purposes is to make sure there is a wide variety of options available," Foley said. With Americans increasingly garaging multiple cars for different uses -- a cute around-town car as well as a larger vehicle for road trips, for example -- prize organizers see design innovation as a way to let the market serve increasingly specialized needs.
Challengers' business plans will have to show financing sources, a marketing proposal and descriptions of expected volumes, costs and prices. Those that pass the initial hurdles will be entered in a qualifying race, tentatively slated for fall of 2009, to show that their paper models work on concrete. For those that meet the benchmarks, a grand prize stage race, possibly in 2010, will select the winner.
The X Prize Foundation traces its inspiration to the adventures of a young, Minnesota-born airmail pilot.
In the early 1900s, nine different teams spent a cumulative $400,000 trying to complete a nonstop flight between New York and Paris to win a $25,000 purse. The eventual winner of the Orteig Prize was Charles Lindbergh, who designed his plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, on the back of an envelope. When he took off, he was unable to see straight ahead because the extra fuel tank he needed was in the way. The Foundation notes he was labeled "the flying fool" right up until his single-engine plan crossed the Atlantic and landed near Paris.
After reading Lindbergh's autobiography, space-addled engineer and entrepreneur Peter Diamandis established the X Prize Foundation in 1995. The first X Prize, renamed the Ansari X Prize after a key donor, met the group's goal of bringing new private-sector entrants into manned space flight. Since then, the group has launched other prizes, including prizes for robotic moon exploration and genomics, and has announced intentions to offer awards for other achievements related to energy and the environment.
But while prizes like Orteig and Ansari are targeted at big leaps, the Automotive X Prize is oriented toward more incremental steps. The organizers have tentatively decided to exclude hydrogen from among the supported fuels, for example, citing the lack of pumps and other infrastructure as evidence that the technology is not near mass production.
Those standards do not exclude teams like the one put together by Zero Pollution Motors, developer of the air car.
Kevin Haydon, the group's communications director, explained that the air car runs on a combination of compressed air and a supplementary energy source like ethanol, gasoline or diesel. Developed by Motor Development International in France, the car can run on air alone up to a speed of 35 miles per hour, Haydon said, after which the fuel kicks in to heat the air for higher speeds. Overall, the car gets about 106 miles to the gallon, he said.
Tata Motors, the Indian industrial giant, holds development rights in India, and Zero Pollution Motors hopes to introduce the car to the United States by building plants in 2009 for vehicle production in 2010.
For Haydon, the X Prize is something of a sideline that promises good publicity for efforts that will be carried out anyway. He was vague on the competition dates, but when informed of the latest planning, he said the French arm expects to have a three-seater model in production by the time the qualification gets under way. Given that timeline, "That's probably the vehicle we'll enter in the X Prize," he said, rather than the six-seat van, sedan or pickup that the company also plans to introduce.
Slightly more familiar but still a far cry from the Big Three automakers' cars is the plug-in hybrid SUV that the Society for Sustainable Mobility plans to enter in the race. What makes SSM's planned entry unique is the design for a modular fuel system for which gasoline, diesel or even fuel-cell engines could be slotted in depending on a user's short-term needs.
David Lee, chairman and founder of the group, said the design is intended to mimic the sort of "plug and play" functionality that consumers have come to expect from computer peripherals. He expects that changing the power source would require a trained technician or mechanic but would take no more than a couple of hours and could be done, for example, before a family heads off on a cross-country trip.
"As an organization, we haven't built a car before, but several individuals in our group have experience building or maintaining vehicles," Lee said. The nonprofit SSM has taken the concept through initial design and is talking with potential investors to put together a more entrepreneurial group that would finish the design and take it to market.
For the moment, Lee plans to tackle the fleet vehicle market, a more controlled, savvy group of users that is often the focus of new transportation technologies. He thinks an initial quantity of 5,000 to 10,000 vehicles per year could be achieved, with larger-scale production for the mass market starting around 2015.
"Usually Detroit will be shooting for 80,000 to 100,000 vehicles per year," Lee said. "But that is a double-edged sword, because it requires you to invest a lot of money in your facility and your tooling, your equipment. That becomes a burden right now for companies in Detroit ... to upgrade their tooling to work with the newer hybrid cars."
But small developers like Lee face their own challenges in competing with the giants. With a serious race on behind those closed doors to market a successor to Toyota's highly successful, but niche market Prius, some component manufacturers are choosing sides. Lee said that in the cutting-edge field of advanced batteries, for example, some vendors have signed exclusive agreements. In-hub wheel motors are starting to show the same trend, he said.
"It's a risk to us, that the supply is diminishing," Lee admitted. "We have to get into some sort of partnership agreement with those suppliers so we don't end up with obsolete parts when we get into production."
As of press time, 64 teams from 10 countries had submitted letters of intent to participate in the X Prize competition. But in the lead-up to today's launch, none of the major automakers had signed on. "We're certainly hopeful that they will compete," said Neal Lurie, senior director of the competition. "Obviously they have some bigger risks to keep in mind. [But] a bigger solution requires their participation."
Lurie hopes that the competition's non-legislative approach to making better cars will lead to new progress. Whether that comes from a big company like General Motors Corp. feeling new pressure to bring its much-hyped Chevy Volt plug-in to market or from an outlier like the air car stirring up new ideas remains to be seen.
As the prize group's Foley put it, "If there's one thing we've learned from American Idol, it's that the person who's declared the winner is often not the winner in the hearts and minds of the American people."
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