Meet the Virginia-Built 110MPG X-Prize Car 370
tcd004 writes "Instead of using Detroit engineers or Silicon Valley bitheads, Virginia-based Edison2 relied on retired Formula 1 and Nascar engineers to build its entry for the X-prize. Relying on composite materials and titanium, the team assembled an ultra-lightweight car that provides all the comforts of a standard 4-passenger vehicle, but gets more than 100 mpg. The custom engineering goes all the way down to the car's lug nuts, which weigh less than 11 grams each. Amazingly, they expect a production version of the car should cost less than $20,000." Earlier today, in a Washington, DC ceremony, Edison2 received $5 million as the X-prize winner. Writes the AP (via Google) "Two other car makers will split $2.5 million each: Mooresville, N.C.-based Li-Ion Motors Corp., which made the Wave2, a two-seat electric car that gets 187 miles on a charge, and X-Tracer Team of Winterthur, Switzerland, whose motorcycle-like electric mini-car, the E-Tracer 7009, gets 205 miles on a charge. Both of those companies are taking orders for their cars."
Can it meet safety standards? (Score:4, Interesting)
Does it have air bags, side-impact beams, crumple zones, etc? It seems like an impressive bit of engineering, but it will never make it to production in the US unless it meets all the government crash and safety standards.
Safety standards are one of the main reasons a 2010 Honda Civic gets nearly the same mileage in practice as a 1990 Civic. Although the more modern car has made strides in improving drive train efficiency, it weighs over 600 lbs more resulting in nearly the same fuel efficiency. Things like side-impact beams, air bags, and ABS make cars safer, but they also make them a lot heavier.
Re:Can it meet safety standards? (Score:5, Interesting)
Does a motorcycle have air bags, side-impact beams, crumple zones...?
Maybe we need a new class of driver's licence.
Re:Nice car (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it's going to have trouble meeting collision safety standards, actually, although it can't possibly be more dangerous than my motorcycle.
I've always thought it odd that we are so terribly worried about safety standards for cars, yet we allow motorcycles. Now, don't get me wrong, I think we should allow motorcycles. It just drives me nuts when we see some rather interesting designs and concepts ignored because it won't meet our standards even though you could make a simple (but clear and obvious) warning that such and such a vehicle does not meet the motor vehicle safety standards.
Maybe a class 'experimental' license that you have to get before you can drive one just to show that you are fully educated about the safety risks and how to mitigate them through behavior (extreme defensive driving).
Re:Nice car (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah I like how people blame oil companies, but more typically it's the car companies themselves that cancel projects (EV1, RAV4) or the lack of interest from customer (Honda Insights barely sold at all). No conspiracy needed.
BTW my Insight can get over 100 MPG with slow driving (55mph) and avoiding use of the brake on the interstate. Of course it's only a two seater but that's fine for my daily commute. The best I've ever done was 121 MPG while driving south-to-north across Utah and Idaho.
Re:Nice car (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nice car (Score:3, Interesting)
Extreme defensive driving is right, because other motorists' perceptions come into play too. For instance, like every other driver on the road, I follow at distances where, if their car is able to slow down faster than mine, or I'm fiddling with the radio, I'm going to rear-end them. Before the banshees come out, hey, I'd avoid it if I could, but the fact is that when I do leave a space that would allow me to stop if they went from 60-0 in 1 second, another car passes and gets in that gap. There's no way to stop the behavior short of driving 30 in a 60mph zone, and that's what crumple zones, airbags, seatbelts, and insurance are for--driving in the real world.
Anyway, when I see a motorcycle, that goes out the window. I'm acutely aware that if they fall off the bike for some reason and I run over them, I'm probably going to kill someone, or at least fuck them up in ways that go far beyond sitting in a courtroom with a neckbrace suing my ass off. Since I'm not willing to accept that, I leave that space, and sometimes, even other drivers don't fill it in. I give them wide berth in other situations as well--just flat out, I never ever ever in my life want to hit a motorcyclist and do everything I can to make sure I don't. I notice most other drivers behave the same way, or at least leave some extra tolerance.
With an experimental car though, you're not going to get that immediate perception of "I'm quite possibly going to kill this person if I hit them." Sure, most of the risk is on the driver of the exotic, but what about steel rods that can detach in a collision and fly through the passenger compartment of a Saturn, or a million other things that can go wrong in weird ways? How do you even begin to evaluate that? Right now we require massive amounts of crash testing, but it becomes a lot less affordable to smash up 50 copies of your car when you might only sell 500 of them, and even then some wild design might cause huge problems in scenarios that aren't tested currently.
Re:Nice car (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Nice car (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a particularly lopsided view of the "oil conspiracy." The reality is that oil companies [wikipedia.org] represent the single largest caucus of industry money with a single purpose: sell more oil. They brought those resources to bear against the California Air Resources Board (CARB) in order to end the public's mandate for zero emissions vehicles, even the smallest amount, which killed electric car development in it's infancy. I remember seeing electric RAV4s and EV1s and Ford Ranger EVs buzzing around in the late 90s in rural Georgia. The technology developed by GM was mothballed by Exxon Mobil, who bought and buried the battery technology. Toyota continued to develop theirs, and now they have top selling hybrid car in the world.
The red herring offered consistently is, why wouldn't GM want to lead the way in electric car development? Two reasons: one, EV technology was receiving zero subsidy after CARB was bought and sold, yet gasoline in the United States is sold at a fraction of the price due to massive subsidies by the US government. The second is that electric motors are hideously reliable, as evidenced by hydroelectric dams that have been in operation for over one hundred years. If a material for infinitely durable shoes was developed by Nike, do you think they would be dumb enough to manufacture and sell it?
It's tough to continue netting billions if you make your product cheaper and more efficient, without being able to drop the price enough to sell it to more consumers. So, as one would naturally expect, you fight any newer technology with every tool you have, while simultaneously buying up the competition and burying new technology. An oil company actively reducing the value of their trillions of dollars of oil infrastructure is like Microsoft funding R&D for open source software. It just doesn't happen.
Eventually the new technology will win, if there is some other industry that will see gains, or if the government steps in to make sure the economy isn't artificially shackled to old technology because of monopolistic business practices. It's fashionable to call that Socialism, but everyone else calls it progress.
I call BS on your BS-calling (Score:3, Interesting)
If that were true don't you think one of the over 100 teams who spent millions of their own money would have done that? Its easy to get 100mpg when you gloss over all of the details and rules, but the X-Prize setup many tests to ensure the car actually got 100mpg in many scenarios. Your alleged PM 100mpg car may not even be true.
Oh come on. VW sells a three-cylinder diesel model in Europe that gets over 65 miles per gallon. You don't think someone could get more than that out of a lighter car with a much smaller engine?
I read this article, not that that's a definitive citation or anything.
The 1980s PM car used a diesel engine that made about 17 horsepower. It was extremely slow to accelerate, but because the engine size was matched up to exactly how much power was needed to keep the car moving, and because a tractor engine can be operated at full power output indefinitely, it meant that the engine was operated right at its peak efficiency most of the time. It got incredible fuel milage at the expense of terrible acceleration performance.
The designers decided that carrying a larger engine with excess reserve power meant that the car would be less efficient at steady-state cruising. They were right. The downside was the car took a very long time to get up to highway speed and couldn't do more than about 65 MPH. At lower speeds, in town, it wasn't much slower than the crappy econoboxes of the time - remember this was when 100 hp seemed like a lot in a small car.
Re:Sad thing being... (Score:3, Interesting)
I found the magazine issue!
Nothing slower than going through the magazine covers and getting distracted...
Anyway it wasn't Popular Mechanics, it was:
Mechanix Illustrated, February 1982.
It was the Quincy-Lynn Centurion that was advertised to have 128 MPG.
Now that I found that issue, that is one less thing floating around in my head. Now if only I can get that stupid song I heard on the radio out of my head...
I don't know. Why do the youngsters today re-invent computer technology that we came up with in the 80's give it a snazzier sounding buzzword and act like they discovered penicillin?
Oh just in case you haven't figured it out... I found my alleged magazine article. Now get off my lawn!
Built one myself, a few years ago, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Admire mine here: http://www.coultersmithing.com/OldStuff/kart.html [coultersmithing.com] I did this so long ago I'm two websites, a new business, and a forum since then. And yes, I still drive it every day, it's handy and did I say fun? Swaps ends with the best of them on a limited traction road....mini cooper claims go-kart handling, but this is far better....and it will climb almost straight up. Other than the body work, does this look a little familiar? Sure does to me. Paid about $2k for this, yeah, they can make them for 10 times that, duh.
Re:Hmmph. Seat ibiza gets 97.4mpg (Score:3, Interesting)
It's nearly impossible to get diesel cars in the US.
Chrysler made a variant of almost every car they sold in the 2009 model year with a diesel engine, all cars gained about 10 MPG from being diesel alone (Most of which were getting 32 MPG on gasoline, so 42 MPG on the switch). They wouldn't sell to the US though, either direct or through a dealer. I'd have to drive to Canada to have boughten one and have it imported home...
Ford won't sell any of their performance diesels in the US either citing no demand and how people still assume diesel = smelly tractor trailers...
Part of the real reason is more current regulations on diesels, that was brought up here on slashdot over 2 years ago. These regs are designed for fleets of industrial vehicles (ie big trucks), but are written to apply to all vehicles using diesel engines and make selling a diesel car within the US both expensive and a pain.
I'd love to run a modern diesel powered car, but right now it's not going to happen.