Via
ABG: the December cover story for Wired magazine is...
1 Gallon of Gas, 100 Miles — $10 Million: The Race to Build the Supergreen Car
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The rules, which will be finalized later this year, have three broad components: efficiency (cars must get at least 100 miles per gallon); emissions (cars must produce less than 200 grams of greenhouse gases per mile); and economic viability (mass production of the cars has to be feasible, and the company has to have a plan to make 10,000 a year). It's this last point — that a winning vehicle has to be safe, comfortable, and ready to be mass-manufactured at a reasonable cost — that will separate the fantasy-mobiles from those that could actually be put into production and sold for a profit. "We do not want toys," says S. M. Shahed, a Honeywell corporate fellow who, as a past president of the International Society of Automotive Engineers, serves as an adviser to the AXP.
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Notable attention is given to Aptera - including new video (worth a look).
The competition will engage armchair ecomodders via the compunets:
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The final AXP event is a 1,000-plus-mile Tour de Francestyle stage race scheduled for 2010. Each vehicle will be fitted with a telemetry black box that streams performance and efficiency data (including fuel flow, amp-hours, and GPS coordinates). So, in addition to being able to follow the teams' progress on a Google Earthstyle interface overlaid with live video, Web users will be able to see, for instance, how much carbon a particular vehicle is spewing on a particular grade, how its range and average fuel efficiency changes in different conditions, fuel costs during various driving situations, and how much upstream energy is being used. The idea is to teach fans, in graphic detail, how driving patterns affect the amount of fuel they use.
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I also learned that vehicles will be judged based on well to wheels emissions so that EV's don't get a "free" pass. They have to take into account emissions from energy produced by the national US grid. To beat the X Prize CO2 emissions threshold (200 grams CO2/mile), EV's have to get better than 133 equivalent MPG.
Guess who doesn't qualify:
But the Aptera certainly does...
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According to the AXP spreadsheet, the Aptera has more than double the efficiency it needs to qualify: It gets 340mpg and spews only 78 grams of greenhouse gases. Soon we'll know whether it, or any of the AXP competitors, has the juice to shift the market — or at least get you to reconsider what you drive to work.
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Read the full article:
1 Gallon of Gas, 100 Miles — $10 Million: The Race to Build the Supergreen Car