100 MPG Competition Sparks Innovation

One of the biggest engineering challenges at the moment, specifically located in the automotive industry, is the race to build a car that can travel 100 miles on a gallon of fuel. It might sound like a farfetched goal, but the $10 million Progressive Automobile X Prize (AXP) competition taking place in 2010 is banking on their challenge sparking a mass of innovation.

From this competition may very well come a car that can travel a hundred miles on a gallon of petrol. Or, this competition might spark a new type of electric car, or any number of other designs.

Two universities are vying for the prize, being offered up by the same people who awarded $10 million Ansari X Prize to Mojave Aerospace Ventures in 2004 for the flight of SpaceShipOne. Cornell and Western Washington University are both actively competing in the mainstream auto class, a class that has 61 entries.

[Read the rest over at Gas 2.0]

Farfetched goal?  Pish tosh.  There are already Priuses converted as plug-in hybrids that get 100 mpg.  That's not to say it's an easy goal, but I don't think calling it 'farfetched' is very accurate either.

The ZPM air car is one of the entries in the X Prize, by the way.

The X prizes are fantastic ways of spurring innovation, the Space X prize had a reward of $10 million, but how much was spent on the research and innovation it spurred? well over $10 million I'll bet.

I think the government should get in on this. They could even offer a better incentive than just money, like an extra long patent, tax breaks or government contracts or maybe even allowing the winning company a monopoly for x number of years or something like that.

McCain proposed a $350M reward for whoever makes the ultimate EV battery. Empty campaign promise? Who knows. He may or may not get the chance to make good on it.

Nevertheless, he's right when he says that we have been rewarding mediocrity for too long and it's about time we start rewarding excellence.

As a sidenote, I think Peter Diamantis will be speaking at Long Now sometime in September. I'm definitely planning to attend that one.

Peter, that's right near my apartment. I'll go check that out. For everyone else, here's the link:

http://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/

Based on a few minutes on their site, it seems like a very interesting organization.

Regarding McCain's battery reward, I'm of the opinion that it's nothing more than a silly gimmick.  Joseph Romm agrees:

POINTLESS: First off, every energy and car company on the planet knows they’ll get rich by improving batteries. The world is probably spending $1 billion a year in this quest. This $300 million prize is a pointless gimmick, just a cynical move to get some good PR.

NOT HOW TECHNOLOGY WORKS: You don’t just invent a battery that has the “cost … to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars.” That requires mass production, hundreds of thousands if not millions of batteries produced a year, to get the economies of scale and the benefits of the manufacturing learning curve. When you “invent” the batttery, you do a spreadsheet on what mass production costs would be. It would be a bureaucratic nightmare to try to figure out who would win this. Does the money go to the most plausible spreadsheet?

Romm also suspects McCain's plan is to give the reward to ExxonMobile, since in one of their commercials they claim to have made a lithium ion battery breakthrough.  That's a bit more cynical than I would go, but I do agree that McCain is just pandering as usual.

I wouldn't be a bit surprised if that's what McCain has in mind. See my comment in the other EV thread.

Really? I'd be very, very shocked if any politician decided to throw an additional $300M to Exxon Mobil for any reason at all. Not even rewarding good behavior. They might as well propose repealing suffrage.

I don't think it's quite fair to call $300M a "pointless gimmick" under any circumstances either.

I don't think car companies know they'll get rich by improving batteries. Some other power source could break through (algae fuel maybe?) and leave batteries in the dust. That's what I don't like about McCain's battery contest, he's already chosen the winning technology. vs. the X-prize that just says make a fuel efficient car, we don't care what tech it uses.

It's kinda the same as congress deciding to subsidize corn ethanol, they're trying to force a winner on us when it's one of the worst sources for alternative fuels.

Define the goal and ignore the technology. Then reward whatever technology achieves the goal.

Why?

As for the $300 million, sure it sounds like a lot, but if any company were to make some leap forward in battery technology, they would make billions in profits.  Nobody needs a $300 million incentive to create a billions of dollars invention.  The point is that the incentive already exists without the prize.

Mattress makes a valid point that the X prize is more all-encompassing than the battery prize proposal.  After all, even the air car is in the X prize competition.  Nevertheless, I think it's clear that EVs are going to win at least in the short term.  Algae biofuel is one of the few potential competitors, and is probably a decade away from large-scale production.  Batteries are already sufficiently advanced to be viable on a large scale (but ultra-capacitors could take them to the next level).

I haven't looked at all of the Auto X entries but it is interesting to see sort of the break down of technologies...

In terms of EVs that are already making waves, here are some of the folks entering: Aptera, Commuter Cars (with a plug-in Tango), Miles Electric Vehicles, Myers Mortos with the NMG, Phoenix Motorcars, Tesla, Venture Vehicles, and Zap.

Those aren't even all the EV entries!

Wouldn't anyone who makes a 100 MPG vehicle that normal humans want to buy (and can afford) also make billions? Why haven't the auto companies already jumped on this? Isn't the Automotive X Prize just as pointless?

Do you donate money to go towards cancer research? Why? the phamacutical company that cures cancer will make billions, surely there is enough incentive to do research without our paltry donations?

A 100 mpg vehicle isn't as revolutionary as what McCain was proposing.  He said something about a major advancement in battery technology that would essentially make current batteries (which are capable of creating a 100 mpg plug-in hybrid) obsolete, assuming I'm remembering correctly.  Of course the way he worded it was very vague, but that was how I took it.

Regarding cancer research, the key term is research.  Funding the actual research to enable the potential discovery of a cure is not the same as giving somebody a prize if they can discover one.

Funding research is very constructive.  Proposing a prize if a new discovery made is just a type of incentive, and an unnecessary one in the case of battery technology.

Cool.  I assume they must calculate an mpg equivalent for fully electric cars, because obviously an EV is using zero gas and thus is technically getting infinite mpg.

Yeah, they must...I know the Tesla website says the Roadster gets 256 mpg equivalent.  But I do wonder how they come up with that number. 

Their footnote says "Conversion from electric consumption to gallons of gasoline equivalent is calculated using the Department of Energy equivalence factor documented in the Code of Federal Regulations, Section 10, Part 474."

Fancy schmancy.  I calculated the equivalent for my electric mopeds (600 and 400 mpg) based on CO2 emissions from PG&E and cost of electricity vs. gasoline (the two calculations gave the same results, interestingly).

I assume the DoE calculation uses the energy density of gasoline and compares it to the energy used by the EV.  Like your EV uses so many kWh to travel such-and-such a distance, which is the amount of energy in 'x' of gallons of gas.

Well see now you made me look it up.

§ 474.3   Petroleum-equivalent fuel economy calculation.

(a) The petroleum-equivalent fuel economy for an electric vehicle is calculated as follows:

(1) Determine the electric vehicle's Urban Dynamometer Driving Schedule energy consumption value and the Highway Fuel Economy Driving Schedule energy consumption value in units of Watt-hours per mile;

(2) Determine the combined energy consumption value by averaging the Urban Dynamometer Driving Schedule energy consumption value and the Highway Fuel Economy Driving Schedule energy consumption value using a weighting of 55 percent urban/45 percent highway; and

(3) Calculate the petroleum-equivalent fuel economy by dividing the appropriate petroleum-equivalency factor (depending on whether any petroleum-powered accessories are installed; see paragraph (b) of this section) by the combined energy consumption value, and round to the nearest 0.01 miles per gallon.

(b) The petroleum-equivalency factors for electric vehicles are as follows:

(1) If the electric vehicle does not have any petroleum-powered accessories installed, the value of the petroleum equivalency factor is 82,049 Watt-hours per gallon.

(2) If the electric vehicle has any petroleum-powered accessories installed, the value of the petroleum-equivalency factor is 73,844 Watt-hours per gallon.

So since I can't go on the highway it doesn't really apply, but my R Martin EVD gets about 890 mpg equivalent based on their conversion factor, whereas based on mine, it's a bit under 400 mpg.  Interesting.