The X-Prize foundation was established help spur developments in a variety of areas including space travel, medicine and genomics. We've had plenty of coverage here of the Automotive X-Prize where the target is to develop a production viable car that can achieve the equivalent of 100mpg. The foundation is now establishing what it calls the Energy and Environment Prize suite that includes the Automotive Prize. The suite will include a number of prize competitions that go beyond just transportation to include clean energy sources. A Biofuels X-Prize has already been created to inspire breakthroughs in next generation sustainable liquid fuels. The biofuels prize competition will officially launch later this year with a prize of at least $10 million. Other categories that will be attacked in the next couple of years include solar power, water, sustainable housing and carbon capture. In total the energy and environment prizes are will give away up to $100 million.

[Sources: X-Prize Foundation, BusinessWeek]

Aspiring Automotive X-Prize competitor Motive Industries has released new images of their car. The original images were design sketches and the new shots are computer generated images. No word yet on when a prototype will actually be running, but Motive does have some interesting ideas for their plug-in hybrid. From the schematics on the Motive site, it appears they are planning a front wheel drive 2+2 with an electric motor driving those front wheels. A rear mounted engine operates as a range extender for the battery mounted under the floor of the car. Motive is working on an automated battery exchange system. If the car is equipped with a range extender it's not clear why a battery exchange system is needed, although developing such a system is probably a good long-term move toward the development of a pure battery EV. Check out more images at the Motive site.

[Source: Motive Industries]

We're really high on the Automotive X Prize, and it was an easy choice as the number one upcoming green event. The Auto X Prize will be worth ten million, and is sponsored by Progressive Casualty Insurance. We've covered everything we know about the X Prize on these pages, and we've even got an entire category regarding the event, which ought to make it pretty easy to follow from here on out. Anyone got a favorite already?

Click on the image for a gallery of high-res renderings of the the Velozzi car

The fact that the Velozzi car is all the way at number nineteen does not mean it isn't an exciting design. In fact, far from it, as the vehicle looks amazing! Velozzi is an R&D group that's focusing on developing alternative fuel vehicles that is planning to compete for the Automotive X-Prize. Problem is, with dual AC motors, lithium ion batteries and a Weismann F1 gearbox, we'd expect a production Velozzi to be rather expensive. We've also never seen anything other than a rendering of a vehicle, so this could be a long way off.


Move on to Number 18.

click to enter gallery

We met Jory Squibb way back in late 2006 over at the Santa Monica Alt Car Expo. How can you miss a guy driving a tiny, 100+mpg bubble car called the Moonbeam? Jory, from Maine, is now back on the ABG radar with his presence at the New York Auto Show. He didn't have a car with him this time, but he did have the idea for a competition vehicle for the Automotive X Prize with him. His new tadpole-style vehicle (that is, two wheels in front, one in back) is called Dirigo, which is the Maine state motto and means "I lead" of "I direct." The Dirigo's powertrain is based on a 950cc Daihatsu turbodiesel engine that sits in the back and drives the front two wheels. Jory told us the Moonbeam taught him that you really need at least half of your wheels providing power (the Moonbeam was also tadpole style, but only driven by the single rear wheel). Jory's team for the Dirigo, which is now a year old, is made up of about four regular members, some of whom are boat builders and are taking the Dirigo in a wooden direction. Learn more by listening to Jory yourself:



UPDATE: Jory sent in a few thoughts on the Auto X Prize at the New York Auto Show. We've pasted his essay after the jump.

Of the 60+ teams that have signed a letter of intent to participate in the Progressive Automotive X Prize, about 15 were on hand at the New York Auto Show. With only four cars on stage, it's easy to calculate that some teams arrived sans vehicle. The group from Motive Industries had just a little folded flyer to show what they've been working on for their entry vehicle. The basic idea for the as-yet-unnamed Motive vehicle is an electric car with an on-board ICE for range extension. The real challenge for Motive will be convincing everyone that "filling up" via quick, robot-aided battery exchanges are the way to go. Four-passenger and full size with biomaterials in the body panels and elsewhere, the vehicle is just now moving off of the design pages. Motive's Darren McKeage and Nathan Armstrong were in New York to give the public a first glimpse of this new car. You can view the flyer in the gallery below and listen to the duo by clicking play.

In the general hub-bub before the Automotive X-Prize kick-off event yesterday, we cornered Progressive Insurance's President and CEO Glenn Renwick for a few brief moments to get his thoughts on the prize. I mean, it's his company that is putting up the ten million dollars in prize money, so you can bet he's thought long and hard about paying someone that much for a freakin' car. While insurers are not usually known for being happy about seeing money go out the door, Renwick said he hopes the company does indeed fork over the money at the end of the race. Renwick said (rightly, IMHO) that he considers the sponsorship to be simply another way of advertising, and as such is coming out of the company's general advertising budget. You might now see fewer Progressive ads on TV, but you'll be seeing the name much more here on ABG. Fair trade? That's not for me to decide.

Look at it from another angle: if we don't figure out a way to move to highly-efficient personal vehicles (and higher gas prices continue climbing as a reflection of dwindling supplies), what would Progressive have to insure? This might be the best $10m they ever spend. Give Renwick a listen using the flash widget below.

Before this release gets too much older (traveling sure eats int blogging time, I'll tell you that), let's confirm what was announced today at the New York Auto Show about the Progressive Automotive X Prize. The full statement can be found after the jump, but here's a bulleted list of highlights:

• NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg said some really nice thing about the prize, and his city will kick off the first stage of the competition in September 2009 (patience, everyone).
  
• The prize is indeed $10m and is being put up by the Progressive insurance company. Winners will split the money 3:1, with the mainstream category winners getting $7.5 million and the alternative class winner walking away with $2.5 million.
  
• Over 60 teams have signed a "letter of intent" to participate in the contest. The full list is included in the release, but the name that surprised me the most was Goodwin-Young "Linc Volt." That's right, everyone's competing against Neil Young. Is it even fair? That guy rocks, but sadly wasn't in New York today.
  
• Applications for official participants will be accepted starting in two months time, and will be accepted for two or three months. Get your forms filled out ASAP, is how I read that. This things on the go.
  
• We're still waiting for things like the final rules document and a list of host cities for the cross-country race.

Stay tuned tomorrow for a lot of interviews, video and audio from the event. There was a lot of excitement about this award, and I think we captured the vibe. Let us know when it goes up. More after the jump.

While wandering around near the Automotive X-Prize booth, look what we stumbled onto: MDI's air car. The green plastic-y version that had just been uncovered - I think for a video team's camera - bears only slight resemblance to the rendering that appeared on the X-Prize screen. It looks even less like the previous version of the Air Car that we've seen before. We'll be sitting down with the people behind the Air Car later today to figure out just what it is we're looking at here.


And look at the cars still snug under the covers. Well, kind of snug. I'm pretty sure I see a CarverOne, don't I? We'll know more in a bit.

Click on the Loremo for a high-res gallery

After the success of the original Ansari X-Prize, the X-Prize Foundation started creating new X-prizes in areas like medicine and cars. The Automotive X-Prize was announced in 2006 and in April of this year, the organizers released the first draft of the rules at the New York Auto Show. While numerous high-mileage car competitions have been held for decades, the X-Prize is distinctly different. Many previous competitions have yielded tiny little stream-liners running on bicycle wheels with tiny engines. While these vehicles have yielded efficiency of hundreds or thousands of miles per gallon they weren't very useful.

The goal of the X-Prize is to produce vehicles that got the equivalent of at least 100 mpg of gasoline and could be sold in volumes of at least 10,000 a year profitably. Two classes were defined, a mainstream one for vehicles with a minimum of four wheels and four seats and a second alternative class for vehicles with at least two seats. In August an initial list of thirty-one entries was announced by the foundation. The first batch of entries run the gamut from names that will be familiar to readers of this site, such as Tesla and Phoenix to home-builts like Maine Automotive X. We decided to take a look at some of these teams, and you can see more information and plenty more picture galleries after the jump.

Click to enlarge the 1/4 scale model of the EXV-LS

This morning serial automotive entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin announced that his Visionary Vehicles company is developing a car that they will enter into the Automotive X-Prize. Visionary Vehicles has undergone a corporate transformation. After launching several years ago with plans to import vehicles built by Chinese manufacturer Chery, the company is now developing a range of new vehicles that they plan to sell beginning in 2010.

Although specifics are scant right now, the first model is planned to have a series hybrid drive-train with a lithium ion battery and plug-in capability. The luxury car, said to the be size of a Mercedes S-Class, is being designed Herb Grasse who designed the original Bricklin SV-1 gull-wing coupe that was briefly built in the 1970s. The plan is to have a battery range of 40-50 miles (Update: est. 850 miles total with the engine running) and a price tag starting at $35,000.

Continue reading after the jump including specs.

Most of the readers of this site will likely have heard of the Automotive X-Prize by now, a competition to develop a commercially viable vehicle that gets the equivalent of 100mpg of gasoline. The beauty of the competition is that it's open to all technology and puts the emphasis on vehicles that could actually be built and sold profitably for a cost that at least 10,000 people a year could afford.

As we mentioned earlier, the X-Prize foundation recently commissioned a survey of Americans that found, surprisingly enough, that sixty-two percent of them were very interested in buying a vehicle that could get 100mpg. Seventy-six percent of the respondents also thought the development of such vehicles would be important to the United States. None of this is a shock, nor is the fact that more than twice as many people cited the cost of highly efficient vehicles over any other reason for not buying them.

I just wanted to add sometime to the earlier post: the vehicles most likely to be practical for daily use that could achieve anywhere near that 100mpg threshold in the near term will use some sort of battery for energy storage. Unfortunately one look at the price of a Tesla Roadster or the manufacturing cost (as opposed to the heavily subsidized price) of a Phoenix SUT will tell you that cost will remain a stumbling block for some time. The cost of those high capacity lithium batteries is still the biggest block to vehicles like the Chevy volt being produced.

[Source: Automotive X-Prize]

Click one the Ale for a high-res gallery of the X-Prize competitor

Three wheelers seem to be all the rage lately for automotive startups. This probably has something to do with the fact that they are classed as motorcycles and therefore not subject to pesky automotive safety regulations like crash tests. A company called FuelVapor Technologies has created a car called the Alé which they are intending to enter in the Automotive X-Prize and our buddy John from Autoblog actually spotted it at the SEMA show last fall.

The X-Prize is looking for cars that exceed 100mpg and the Alé currently only gets a claimed 92mpg from its modified Honda four-cylinder engine. The team has developed a fuel system they claim vaporizes the gasoline and runs at extremely line lean air-fuel ratios. Currently it looks like it's optimized more for performance than efficiency so they probably have some room for adjustment. What may be a bigger problem is demonstrating that there is a market for 10,000 of these a year, as required by the X-Prize rules.

[Source: FuelVapor Technologies via Gizmodo]

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

Click on the image for a gallery of high-res renderings of the the Velozzi car

Team Velozzi is one of the teams that is planning to compete for the Automotive X-Prize. They are an R&D group that's focusing on developing alternative fuel vehicles. Assuming they don't change direction they will be competing in the class for two seat or more vehicles, with a car that currently looks like it could have come from a design studio in a certain region of Northern Italy. The current specs list dual AC motors and lithium ion batteries. They also show a Weismann F1 gearbox although that should probably be unnecessary. Since one of the criteria that the X-Prize judges will be looking at is the business model and productibility of the vehicle, it will be interesting to see if Velozzi changes their design direction away from what appears to be a two seat super-car to something more mainstream, but still battery powered.



[Source: Team Velozzi]