What is the relationship between a spaceship and a 100 mpg car?
Two years ago, the $10M Ansari X Price was given to Burt Rutan and Richard Branson for their creation and development of SpaceShipOne, the first privately funded vehicle capable of human spaceflight.
The idea behind this prize was to spur commercial development of the human spaceflight category. The prize offered money, but also the publicity associated with winning the prize. The competition was a vibrant competition between multiple teams of entrepreneurs all racing to claim the price.
An important element of the competition is that the rules were developed to encourage practical designs that could be readily moved into commercial production; the prize was not going to reward theoretical “concept” vehicles that had no possible commercialization path. For example, in order to win the prize, the same vehicle had to make two trips to 100 km within two weeks. Not even NASA’s Space Shuttle would meet that requirement.
The idea is that the design of the vehicle had to take into consideration the need for rapid reuse cycles.
The X Prize Foundation, has recently announced their next competition, the Automotive X Prize, and it is focused on developing commercially viable vehicles capable of getting a sustained mileage of at least 100 miles per gallon.
The group has not yet announced the financial prize amount (I think they are still gathering money from donors), but according to a New York Times article it is “expected to carry a prize of more than $10 million.”
In the same spirit as the Ansari X Prize, the competition is focused on developing practical cars that have a real potential of mass production, not just “concept cars”. For example, the cars “must be designed to meet safety regulations in the U.S. and other markets”. This precludes the use of extremely light materials that would be unsafe to build with.
In addition, the “vehicle cost at a production rate of 10,000 units per year must be within levels that the market is likely to bear.” This precludes the use of highly experimental designs that would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce and, thus, would not be commercially viable.
On top of this, “the race courses will reflect typical consumer driving patterns during numerous stages, in varied terrain, communities, and weather conditions.” This will prevent theoretical gas mileage claims that don’t bear out in reality.
There will be two “classes” of prizes given:
- A “mainstream” class for “4+ passenger vehicles with 4+ wheels that meet conventional expectations for size and capability”
- And an “alternative” class which is “an outlet for innovative ideas that push forward today’s conventions about automotive transportation (2+ passengers, no requirement on number of wheels)”
I think this is a great thing. It will hopefully spur the same sort of innovation that went into the original Ansari X Prize.
However, the participants should make sure not to pay too much attention to the words of General Motor’s vice chairman Bob Lutz who commented (on an unrelated convertation) that:
“There is no technological bag of tricks that enables much better fuel economy than we have today. … Despite what alarmists may think, we don’t have any magic 100-mpg carburetor that we’re holding back because we’re in bed with the oil companies.â€
Let’s see if they can prove him wrong.
More Reference:
On Point had an hour long show on the prize a couple of weeks ago.
on April 5th, 2007 at 7:28 pm
I just hate that it always comes down to money. I hope that something good come out of it. There are already vehicles that can do this. A pluggable Prius for example. http://www.calcars.org/priusplusstrategy.html
You can’t buy one yet, but they exist. I bought a Prius last week, the second hybrid in our family (the other one is a Civic Hybrid I’ve had since 2003). The Prius is a great car, and I plan to get 100+ MPG out of it at some point. I’m at 50+ right out of the showroom, so I’m already half way there!
on April 5th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
I wonder what happened to offering prizes for innovation. This used to be common, say back at the beginning of the twentieth century. Is this a result of changes in patent laws? or something else?
on April 5th, 2007 at 11:45 pm
Speaking of Prius’s, this was in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer:
Commentary
Hidden cost of driving a Prius
Totaling all the energy expended, from design to junkyard, a Hummer may be a better bargain.
By James L. Martin
When it comes to protecting the environment, senior citizens should concentrate more on the total energy consumed in building and operating a car than its fuel efficiency - no matter how impressive the statistics appear on the window sticker at the showroom.
A prime example is Toyota’s Prius, a compact hybrid that’s beloved by ardent environmentalists and that fetches premium prices because it gets nearly 50 miles-per-gallon in combined highway/city driving.
Yet, new data have emerged that show the Prius may not be quite as eco-friendly as first assumed - if you pencil in the environmental negatives of producing it in the first place.
Like most hybrids, the Prius relies on two engines - one, a conventional 76-horsepower gasoline power plant, and a second, battery-powered, that kicks in 67 more horses. Most of the gas is consumed as the car goes from 0 to 30, according to alarmed Canadian environmentalists, who say Toyota’s touting of the car’s green appeal leaves out a few pertinent and disturbing facts.
The nickel for the battery, for instance, is mined in Sudbury, Ontario, and smelted at nearby Nickel Centre, just north of the province’s massive Georgian Bay.
Toyota buys about 1,000 tons of nickel from the facility each year, ships the nickel to Wales for refining, then to China, where it’s manufactured into nickel foam, and then onto Toyota’s battery plant in Japan.
That alone creates a globe-trotting trail of carbon emissions that ought to seriously concern everyone involved in the fight against global warming. All told, the start-to-finish journey travels more than 10,000 miles - mostly by container ship, but also by diesel locomotive.
But it’s not just the clouds of greenhouse gases generated by all that smelting, refining, manufacturing and transporting that worries green activists. The 1,250-foot-tall smokestack that spews huge puffs of sulphur dioxide at the Sudbury mine and smelter operation has left a large swath of the surrounding area looking like a surrealistic scene from the depths of hell.
On the perimeter of the area, skeletons of trees and bushes stand like ghostly sentinels guarding a sprawling wasteland. Astronauts in training for NASA actually have practiced driving moon buggies on the suburban Sudbury tract because it’s considered a duplicate of the Moon’s landscape.
“The acid rain around Sudbury was so bad it destroyed all the plants, and the soil slid down off the hillside,” David Martin, Greenpeace’s energy coordinator in Canada, told the London Daily Mail.
“The solution they came up with was the Superstack. The idea was to dilute pollution, but all it did was spread the fallout across northern Ontario,” Martin told the British newspaper, adding that Sudbury remains “a major environmental and health problem. The environmental cost of producing that car battery is pretty high.”
A “Dust to Dust” study by CNW Marketing Research of Bandon, Ore., shows the overall eco-costs of automotive hybrids may be even higher.
Released last December, the study tabulated all data on the energy necessary to plan, build, sell, drive and dispose of a vehicle from drawing board to junkyard, including such items as plant-to-dealer fuel costs, distances driven, electricity usage per pound of material in each vehicle, and hundreds of other variables.
To put the data into understandable terms for consumers, CNW translated it into a “dollars per lifetime mile” figure, or the energy cost per mile driven. When looked at from that perspective, the Prius and other hybrids quickly morphed from fuel-sippers into energy-guzzlers.
The Prius registered an energy-cost average of $3.25 per mile driven over its expected life span of 100,000 miles. Ironically, a Hummer, the brooding giant that has become the bête noir of the green movement, did much better, with an energy-cost average of $1.95 over its expected life span of 300,000 miles. And its crash protection makes it far safer than the tiny Prius.
Such information should be of major concern to senior citizens - especially those on a fixed budget.
If seniors need a small gas-sipping car for city travel, however, the undisputed champion is Toyota’s own gasoline-powered subcompact, the Scion xB, whose energy cost averaged a negligible 48 cents for each mile traveled over its lifetime.
Fully armed with all the facts, seniors may want to zip down to their nearest Toyota dealer and trade in their Priuses for Scion xBs. That would be the equivalent of reducing their energy footprint from a size 24D to about a size 5A. In the case of global warming, one small step for man may turn out to be a giant leap for mankind.
on April 9th, 2007 at 3:41 am
No matter what I do to try to help, there is somebody out there who has “proof” that I’m doing the wrong thing
Since I don’t have the time or resources to do my own research I have to rely on and trust others. The more involved I become with the whole Global Warming issue, the more confused and frustrated I get. I understand there are no simple answers, but what are we to do, and who are we to trust?
on April 9th, 2007 at 5:26 am
Dean, I didn’t mean to attack your choice; I think it’s the right one and, for various reasons, the article in the Philly paper was tripe — one obvious one being that over time, the energy required to manufacture a Prius will decline, as Hybrid technology improves. Mostly, I put the article there as something that is being said and giving Eric an idea of something that he might want to write against. Sorry if it seemed otherwise.
on April 9th, 2007 at 5:29 am
Also, speaking of environmentally friendly cars, this story was interesting, and perhaps blogworthy.
Credit Ford Motor Co. CEO Alan Mulally with saving the leader of the free world from self-immolation.
Mulally told journalists at the New York auto show that he intervened to prevent President Bush from plugging an electrical cord into the hydrogen tank of Ford’s hydrogen-electric plug-in hybrid at the White House last week. Ford wanted to give the Commander-in-Chief an actual demonstration of the innovative vehicle, so the automaker arranged for an electrical outlet to be installed on the South Lawn and ran a charging cord to the hybrid. However, as Mulally followed Bush out to the car, he noticed someone had left the cord lying at the rear of the vehicle, near the fuel tank.
“I just thought, ‘Oh my goodness!’ So, I started walking faster, and the President walked faster and he got to the cord before I did. I violated all the protocols. I touched the President. I grabbed his arm and I moved him up to the front,” Mulally said. “I wanted the president to make sure he plugged into the electricity, not into the hydrogen This is all off the record, right?”
on April 9th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
Dean, I don’t think you need to be disheartened yet. As Josh stated, the article was flawed. For example, the costs are based on the average Prius lasting 100,000 miles while the average Hummer gets to 300,000. It’s my understanding that 100,000 miles was Toyota’s original estimage for the first generation Prius. As the technology has improved (and continues to improve) that lifetime increases, with a direct effect on these calculations.
For example, if you drive your Prius 200,000 miles, the cost becomes $1.60 per mile (assuming $2.50 per gallon and 50 miles per gallon). That is now below the Hummer’s $1.95.
I haven’t found anything that tells me who the CNW Marketing Research group is or how they came up with their numbers. In general, I don’t believe any study that doesn’t tell me how they did their calculations. Otherwise, they are just doing magic tricks with numbers. As you can see above, anyone can make math do their bidding, even me.
on April 9th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
I just realized that I could have much more succinctly asserted my point by quoting Disraeli. There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
on April 9th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
CNW’s homepage inspires no confidence. and i think the FAQ was written by third graders — and apparently either not updated since 2003 or is slamming its own CEO for taking years to learn to ride a motorcycle.
Definitely high class all the way.
given the ubiquity and ease of google, you think newspaper editors might take a second to look up a little info on what they’re printing. might have second thoughts if you saw CNW’s amateurish homepage.
on April 10th, 2007 at 1:09 am
My favorite part of the FAQ:
Why don’t you do business in Alabama?
We recognize 49 states and the District of Columbia. We do not accept business from Alabama. It’ll take more than one beer for any further details.
To get to Grampa Simpson’s ideal number of states they need to remove one more. Any nominations? I’ve always thought New Hampshire was a bit peculiar.
on April 10th, 2007 at 7:24 pm
I would have gone with Mississippi myself, for the obvious reasons, but Vicki’s outside-the-box thinking is much better: I’m tired of a handful of New Hampsirites deciding the presidential primaries. So I say out with the granite state.
on April 19th, 2007 at 7:28 am
Interesting article on the Prius vs the Hummer (sounds like a David and Goliath story…). I have often wondered about the
environmental impacts of the additional systems in a
hybrid.
I don’t think it’s a fair assessment, however, since
the Hummer and xB are standing on the shoulders of
undoubtedly worse beginnings than the Prius, if you
consider all the iterations, failures, reseach, and
development that it took for their position on the
chart. The xB I could see as now being the lowest
cradle to cradle impacts, but I think the author has
an ax to grind in mentioning the Hummer.
One thing that really stands out is the expected
mileage from the Hummer (300k) vs the Prius (100k) -
if anything I would expect them to be reversed given
Toyota’s durability vs GM’s. In any case, the metric
should really have the same mileage to be of any use.
I would wonder if the Sudbury, Ont nickel plant is
just a particularly bad example, and if there are
other more environmentally conscious ways to obtain
nickel - I would guess there are. Pass the ax across
the stone again. Parts for Hummers and xBs also do
some globe-trotting, no doubt. Grind some more.
Hybrids will one day soon be below the cradle to
cradle impact of other cars like the xB, but it is
unfair to judge them during their infancy without
including some factor for development costs vs decades
of mass-manufacturing and efficiency studies. Product
life cycle impacts all look bad at the beginning.
Comparison to the Hummer is just an attempt to get
greater media coverage. In the end, reporters work
for subscription sales, not conveyance of truth. They
need ’splash value’ with just enough truth to be able
to bump other stories.
on August 12th, 2007 at 8:04 am
[…] In early April, the Automotive X Prize was announced with the goal of showing the feasibility of a production quality, affordable car that can get 100 mpg. This was covered in a previous blog article. […]