Just received this in my inbox from Automotive X Prize. They are already set to launch the contest on the 20th of March at the 2008 New York International Auto Show. In line with that is the announcement of who their main sponsor will be. 60 teams from nine countries have already signed a letter of intent to join the contest.
The purpose of the Automotive X Prize is:
To Design, build and bring to market 100 MPG or equivalent (MPGe) vehicles that people want to buy and that meet market needs for price, size, capability, safety and performance.
The Automotive X Prize is part of the Ansari X Prize Foundation that hopes to solve some of the great challenges facing man by offering monetary prizes to competing teams which can solve these problems. This is similar in concept to the private prizes put up during the early days of aviation which brought about its rapid development[source].
Their mission is:
To bring about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity[source]
Like I said before, this is just what is needed to help ween us off fossil fuels. Some critics like to put down alternative energy fuels so much because of the inefficiency and non net positive process it uses to convert crops to usable fuel. My answer to that is that it is a two fold process. Planting alternative energy crops is but one of them, the other is to develop more fuel efficient machines.
The internal combustion engine is a century old yet the efficiencies we get from it is still way below 30%. It was originally designed to run on alternative energy crops but because of the abundance of cheap oil at that time it was not developed.
Category: Automotive
