During the recent New York Auto Show, AutoblogGreen had a chance to spend a few minutes talking to Neal Anderson, one the Senior Directors of the Automotive X-Prize competition. We discussed the draft rules that were just released and what the goals of the competition are. You can also here the audio as part of ABG podcast #3 (coming soon).

AutoblogGreen: I'm talking with Neal Anderson from the Automotive X-Prize and why don't we start off, Neal, tell us a little bit about the background of the X-Prize Foundation, the Automotive X-Prize and your involvement in that.

Neal Anderson: You bet. The X-Prize Foundation started back in '96 and Peter Diamandis, the founder and chairman of the X-Prize Foundation had a vision of opening up the space industry and breaking it out of the government's hold on it and opening up private space flight. So he launched the Ansari X-Prize back in '96. That prize was awarded in 2004 to Burt Rutan and Paul Allen who won the Ansari X-Prize, a $10 million prize, which had a tremendous impact on the industry. Richard Branson of Virgin, now Galactic bought the winning technology and you can get tickets as a space for a couple hundred thousand dollars a pop. And you're starting to see more than six or seven companies that are vying to the first to space with the technology that he was inspired by that prize. Plus lots of media attention too and one of the great things about the prizes is that you really offer a lot of leverage to investors. So for a $10 million prize there were twenty-six teams from seven countries that invested quite a bit of money. I believe it was $100 million to try to win the prize and then we had Branson spending $120 million afterwards to buy the winning technology. A little bit of money can really spur a lot of investment. The idea for the X-Prize Foundation was spawned by Charles Lindbergh and his pursuit of the Orteig Prize, which a lot of people don't know that Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic to try to win a $25,000.00 prize and that really – after he did that that opened up the aviation industry tremendously. That's a little background on the, on the X-Prize Foundation. In the wake of the success of the Ansari X-Prize, lots of individuals challenged Peter to broaden the scope of the X-Prize model to focus beyond space and kind of bring this X-Prize model up to areas of energy, education, healthcare and things of that nature. So the Automotive X-Prize is the third X-Prize that's focused on energy, we launched a prize that's focused on healthcare in the genomics field late last year. So the Automotive X-Prize is really – our focus is to to inspire a new generation of super efficient vehicles that help break our addiction to oil and stem the effects of climate change. So we're using the same model to help break open the bottleneck of innovation that's happening in the automotive industry, to try see a whole new generation of viable, production capable super efficient vehicles come out of this competition.

Continue reading the rest of our discussion after the jump