Was reading this article about the new Green Car X-Prize challenge and thought I’d see what fellow 'dopers think about it.
I can hardly wait to see what the various contestants come up with from my own perspective. It sounds a bit subjective to me though as far as how the winner is going to be finally determined…I mean, I expect several cars to be able to meet the challenge parameters so it sounds like it will come down to judging which of the cars that make it are ready for production…whatever that means to the individual judges.
Anyway, what are your thoughts on this prize…or on the X-Prizes in general? Will they help to spark public interest in spur on development of technologies we need?
(I can hardly wait to see if anyone win’s Google’s Lunar X-Prize!)
To be practical, though, I hope they take good account of what car buyers actually want. A flimsy 2-seater with the power of a golf cart will never be a huge seller, however great its gas mileage. Of course, even there, some of the technology may be transferable to the mass market.
IIRC (I’m at work again so can’t look up the article I linked to) there are multiple categories for the competition. In addition the car has to meet some fairly rigorous specification like being able to go 100 MPH, travel a fairly long distance between being fueled and go from 0 to 60 in like 12 seconds (there were some more I believe).
It doesn’t have to be fuel efficient to be eco friendly. Ideally, it should adapt to today’s technology and the source of power be plentiful/cheap in supply.
I think the space-flight X-Prize was more worthwhile. With getting a chunk of weight way off the ground, the engineering is the important thing. Whether it’s practical for re-use or mass production is unimportant.
Designing an eco-friendly vehicle, while interesting, has the potential to create five or ten or however many cars that, while eco-friendly, are completely impractical for scale-production, real world commuter use, and would require a revamp of the automobile infrastructure of the US (and elsewhere.)
Sure, one or a few of them might come up with some tricks that are useful for daily use, but all the money and attention could go to a vehicle which has no useful engineering tricks incorporated into it. The Aptera, for instance, is interesting but you’re never going to convert the traffic of the United States over to lightweight vehicles with three wheels and a zero coefficient of drag. Trucker rigs make the idea scary to anyone who ever envisions being in an accident.
I’d rather see the money go to whoever can plan a better way of arranging our living and working spaces so that we don’t need the world’s least reasonable form of transportation (individual private vehicles) in order to go buy a gallon of milk.
The contest is only open to vehicles capable of reaching production, based on various criteria, such as cost, safety, business plan, etc. I’m not saying that there won’t be hurdles, but I certainly wouldn’t rule the winner out. Even the Tesla Roadster is finally going into production (and my understanding is that they are working on an entry to this contest).
The challenge should have expressly defined “eco-friendly, efficient car” as “car that does not run on fossil fuels nor any other nonrenewable or non-eco-friendly fuel and yes, dammit, that does include ethanol.”
sigh You don’t seem to understand. This isn’t a problem that can be solved through individual choices. You can move, say, to a dense, walkable, mixed-use urban setting; but the built environment of suburban sprawl remains, and must be fed its daily diet of petroleum.
The US has a high land to people ratio. Most other (modern) nations of the world have population densities that are friendly to mass transportation. The US doesn’t.
Short of marking off all land outside of urban centers as disallowed for further human inhabitation, we’re screwed on this front until someone can figure out a way to run a bus in front of every house in the suburbs that wouldn’t take 4-hours and lose money hand over fist.
Which doesnt mean we can’t have settlement densities that are friendly to mass transportation.
Not so far-fetched an idea as you seem to think. Portland, Oregon, has an urban growth boundary which, while much less draconian than what you are describing, has been largely effective in channeling new development away from the greenfields and into areas already developed.