http://magazine.windingroad.com/windingroad/200708web/?folio=21

This has the potential to be interesting. Their first venture certainly was. I’m sure you recall it. Twice within five days, in September and October of 2004, a manned spacecraft took off from Mojave Airport in California and soared almost seventy miles up, well over the sixty-two-mile limit that’s the frontier of space.

On its own, this wasn’t anything special. Men have walked on the moon, after all. But what made the flights so noteworthy was that they were achieved by private enterprise, not by NASA’s technological might. And they were prompted by a prize.

Yes, that’s right. To win a prize of $10 million, experimenters and entrepreneurs spent far more than that to put civilians into space—briefly, for the SpaceShipOne’s pilots were only weightless for three and a half minutes. That twenty-six teams lodged plans to attempt the feat and five made significant steps toward hardware and testing shows the power of a prize to promote a great undertaking. The successful flights have been followed up by a $100 million commitment from Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic to put paying passengers aboard five passenger ships now abuilding.

A previous example of note was the prize of $25,000 offered by New York’s Raymond Orteig in 1919 for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris. It was the inspiration for Charles Lindbergh’s successful crossing of 1927. Eight years thus elapsed between announcement of the prize and its awarding to Lindbergh. In 1995, Peter Diamandis announced the $10 million X Prize for a successful spacecraft; nine years later, it was awarded to Paul Allen’s Scaled Composites for the successful flights of an airborne rocket designed by Burt Rutan.

Now the St. Louis-based X Prize Foundation has turned its attention to the automobile. At the New York Auto Show in April, it announced the Automotive X Prize, the goal of which is “to inspire a new generation of super-efficient vehicles that help break our addiction to oil and stem the effects of climate change.” Prize money is yet to be determined but it’s likely to be around $25 million. That should flush some potential developers out of the shrubbery!

Some of you might wonder why this is necessary. With American gasoline prices heading for four bucks a gallon, aren’t market forces enough to inspire automakers to build more efficient vehicles? They can draw on know-how from past projects, like Bill Clinton’s Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles. Using diesel-hybrid technology, it showed that 80 miles per gallon was reachable in 1999. They can even look to Europe, where a number of current car models exceed 60 mpg on the road and some approach 70.

The X Prize people don’t think this is good enough. “The Foundation decided to expand into genomics, energy, and education with its prizes,” explained executive director Mark Goodstein. “In the energy side, we toyed around with various ideas and settled on the automotive industry…We wanted to see what will actually change an industry that is so mature, and so seemingly resistant to change that the gas mileage of the original Model T is better than the average gas mileage of vehicles on the road today.”

After they “toyed around,” the X Prize managers began talking with automotive developers, academics, journalists, and the inevitable critics in 2006, staging a major brainstorming session in July of last year. Among current automakers, only Honda and Ford participated in what was an almost entirely North American exercise. From this, the Automotive X Prize was formulated. It was published in draft form on April 2 on the website auto.xprize.org. Nominally sixty days were allowed for comments, but you might still be able to have your say.

It takes thirty-two pages to describe all the proposed Automotive X Prize criteria. Highlights are these:

1. The vehicle must achieve at least 100 mpg, or the energy equivalent thereof.

2. The vehicle must emit no more than 200 grams per mile of greenhouse gases.

3. The vehicle must meet all safety requirements throughout the world.

4. The production cost at 10,000 units per year must be “within levels that the market is likely to bear” and supported by a “clear and viable” business case.

5. The vehicle must be “desirable.”

6. A plethora of specific performance criteria must be met, depending on whether the car is in the mainstream class, for four-wheelers with four passengers, or the alternative class, for two-passenger cars with as many wheels as desired.

7. Letters of intent to take part in the exercise will be accepted until September, after which plans will be assessed and teams to participate selected in 2008. In 2009, finalists will take part in a qualifying race and a grand prize final race to determine a winner. These races could be as long as coast-to-coast in America.

8. Finalists with production-intent designation will demonstrate that they have “the capability and intention to manufacture and sell the vehicle in the year after the final race.”

As you can see from these few highlights, the AXP people are taking on a massive task of assessment and adjudication. The potential for cheating in the qualifying and final races will be so great that they’ll need to have NASCAR’s tech inspectors on the job.

Speaking of racing, one of the wealthy X Prize trustees is Kevin Kalkhoven. His biography on the X Prize website rightly lauds his entrepreneurship but omits altogether Kalkhoven’s part ownership of the Champ Car series, formerly CART, of a Champ Car team, and of Cosworth Racing, builder of engines for the series. In other words, he is, as we say in England, a “petrolhead.” Perhaps mentioning this would have lowered the tone of AXP’s lofty website.

Some aspects of the proposed rules are patently unworkable. The idea that a competitor could be producing his vehicle in the 2009-10 time frame from a starting point this year is ludicrous. Instead, success in the Automotive X Prize should be a springboard to success in funding his or her manufacturing effort. Lengthy continent-spanning “races” to demonstrate the durability of the contestants aren’t needed. It would be sufficient for designs to show the potential for long-term durability.

Nor does the mission statement make sense. “Super-efficient vehicles” are welcome, but how are they to “stem the effects of climate change”? If you accept that increased greenhouse-gas emissions are changing the climate—a point on which there’s still disagreement—all that these vehicles would do is slow that rate of change. They can make no contribution whatsoever to dealing with the effects or consequences of a changing climate.

It’s not for me to tell the X Prize trustees what to do with their mega-billions. But I would suggest that some of them throw tens of millions in the direction of Munich’s Uli Sommer and Gerhard Heilmaier. At the March 2006 Geneva International Motor Show, they unveiled their Loremo, short for “Low Resistance Mobile.” It’s an ingenious ultralight 2+2 turbo-diesel passenger car for which they claim mileage of better than 150 mpg—156 to be specific. There’s even a GT version that gets 87 mpg while offering 0-62-mile-per-hour acceleration in nine seconds and a top speed of 137 mph.

Well-styled and cleverly engineered for production (see www.loremo. com), the Loremo meets the AXP’s “desirable” criterion. With the motto “Simple, Clever, Fun,” the company is now raising the funds to start production in 2009 in just the initial annual volume of 10,000 that the AXP requires. They have a clear road ahead, said Heilmaier: “None of the big manufacturers has plans for this segment.”

For all practical purposes, then, the goal of the AXP has already been met. Does this mean that they should raise their sights? Shoot instead for something really radical? An earthbound equivalent to an outer-space breakthrough? It’s worth a thought.

Magazine Issue: Winding Road Issue 23