X Prize Winners Look Weird … With Good Reason

[n2doc]

By Jason Fagone September 16, 2010 | 6:06 pm | Categories: Alt Fuel, Cool Cars, EVs and Hybrids


WASHINGTON — Let’s start with the obvious. The three winning Progressive Automotive X Prize vehicles announced today certainly look a tad strange.

One is a banana-yellow enclosed motorcycle from Switzerland. Another is a neon-green coupe that resembles a well-rubbed bar of Irish Spring. And the big $5 million winner, the inspired creation of a startup company from Lynchburg, Virginia. called Edison2, looks like a bird skull dipped in liquid chrome, a piece of high-flown origami or a particularly angular foil-wrapped chipotle burrito — take your pick.

So chuckle if you want — but as the founder of Edison2, Oliver Kuttner, likes to say, “Facts are stubborn things.” And here are the facts…


Kuttner’s car, the aptly named Very Light Car, gets 102.5 mpg equivalent (MPGe). It weighs a scant 830 pounds. If you drive it at 70 mph and take your foot off the throttle, it coasts for a mile-and-a-half before it reaches 10 mph. The E-Tracer enclosed motorcycle, made by the Swiss company Peraves, gets 187.6 MPGe. And the neon-green Wave II by North Carolina’s Li-ion Motors? It clocks in at 187 MPGe.







Read More http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/09/x-prize-winners-look-weird-with-good-reason/

[JohnWxy]

1. They forgot to mention the Edison2 car is powered by E85 ethanol gasoline fuel.

With the higher octane delivered with the ethanol they could turbo-charge the engine and get much higher power output per cu. in. and per pound! (Ahhh, if only the auto manufacturers would do something so 'radical' as using turbo-charging in their FFVs to take advantage of the higher octane of ethanol and get more power out of their engines thus they could reduce the engine size ... and improve fuel consumption!)

The car was named the Edison2 because initially, the designers of the car thought they would use electric power. But after studying the problem they concluded because of the importance of weight, they would do better using an ICE, with the proper fuel, than going with the increased weight of a battery powered car.

The head of the team that built the Edison2 is thinking of building an efficient light-weight car that would be affordable for the average person. He says even if you have the best technology in the world, it isn't going to have the impact you would like if too few people can afford it. His focus is on an approach to reducing gasoline consumption that could be rapidly deployed, getting results sooner.

[Norrin Radd]

2. The yellow motorcycle looks inspired by the Tron lightbikes.