[lorenzo]

Great news, the X-Prize foundation's Automotive Prize now has its long awaited own website.

The goal of the prize is simple: create a hyper-efficient and clean car.

I'm not a technoprogressivist per se, but anyone who knows a bit about automotive technologies knows that it's a piece of cake to make an affordable car that gets 150/200 miles per gallon. The X-prize wants to push the boundaries further than that, though: 250mpg, and affordable.

The only thing that's holding car manufacturers back is market dynamics and risk aversion because of their corporate gigantism.

So all Peak Oilers should rejoice: the X-prize will see a winner, and the winner will sell (according to the rules) more than 10,000 or so cars that get around 250 miles per gallon. (So no concept cars, but actual sales - this was seen as the goal in first drafts of the rules that haven't been worked out entirely but that will resemble these numbers).

I like these people from the X-prize, they say something like: THE BEGINNING IS NEAR.

We are finally entering the age of normal cars. We are leaving the dinosaur era where cars got 50 miles per gallon behind.

http://auto.xprize.org/



Why don't you participate yourself? Just for fun. With a few thousand dollars you can make a car that gets 150 mpg easily. If you hook up with a few friends you could make 200 mpg, should suffice to participate - just because you can!

[rwwff]

Does the car have to include all the "safety" features required by the US Government?

[lorenzo]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('rwwff', 'D')oes the car have to include all the "safety" features required by the US Government?

[rwwff]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('lorenzo', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('rwwff', 'D')oes the car have to include all the "safety" features required by the US Government?

[morph]

A car that has reasonable performance (equivalant to todays cheap cars) and does 250mpg would sell quite a lot in my opinion especially in europe where petrol is costlier..

Just thinking about the timeline for this type of project. Im no car expert but im guessing it's going to be up to 5 possibly 10 years to develop so no quick solution.

[tsakach]

It is really good to see someone taking an initiative like this.

Too bad they choose the "gallon" as a unit to measure performance. An XPrize category for electric vehicles would be nice too.

[Heineken]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('lorenzo', 'T')he goal of the prize is simple: create a hyper-efficient and clean car.

[Omnitir]

Sounds great at first, but then you realise that 250mpg cars arn't that difficult to achieve. Though selling 10,000 of them is a bit harder.

At 285mpg, I guess this VW, made in 2002, could be well on the way to winning the auto X-Prize.

Heineken – okay, I agree that the world would be better without cars, but surely you can see the benefits of striving for increased efficiency? It’s hardly “useless thinking” to pursue efficiency.

You have indirectly pointed out, there is considerable room for dramatic increases in efficiency in both operating costs of cars and also manufacturing costs.

Unfortunately, people love their cars, and so they are going to be built. Do you really think that it’s not worthwhile to strive for reduced waste in the automotive system? Does it really have to be either all or nothing, either gridlock SUV nation or rail and foot?

[garyp]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Heineken', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('lorenzo', 'T')he goal of the prize is simple: create a hyper-efficient and clean car.

[lorenzo]

The "no more cars" argument is based on bad experiences from the past - and on a tradition where cars made a miserable (today one would say "criminal") 30mpg's.

But in principle there's nothing wrong with cars as such. There is something wrong with boxes of ugly metal that don't get more than 200mpg though. So let's use the dirty, annoying past to build a brighter future. Let's build a first generation of cars that get 250mpg, so that we can use this as an argument to tell people who still drive inefficient metal boxes, that their behavior is wrong.

But as such, the car is extremely important to our well being and to the well being of the planet. There's a simple anthropological and psychological argument for this: without the car, people from the West would be even more psychotically destructive than they are today already.

The car takes away stress (even though at times it adds stress). The car opens a fantasy space for people, and a myth of freedom, individualism and speed. It's this myth that's responsible for our Progress and for our modernity.

I'm sure modernity will survive without the car. But the car just captures and drives us towards affirming our modernity, each and every day.

Don't underestimate the anthropological significance of the car. It's not just a tool for mobility. It's a crucial signifier in our crucial cultural myth about modernity.


There here's no better way to push the "energy efficiency" paradigm, than applying it to that crucial mytheme.

[Heineken]

Trying to reason with car enthusiasts is like trying to reason with gun lovers. An exercise in futility. Nevertheless . . .

Cars destroyed the sense of community in America and made us strangers to one another. In so doing, they encouraged a permanent epidemic of crime. They destroyed the nation's cultural diversity, making one area look much like another. They turned us into a country of cheese puffs with clogged arteries. They've killed more people than all the wars in our history put together. They've wasted vast mountains of resources that could have been put to better use. They've enslaved millions to the high cost of buying and maintaining and fueling cars. They've permanently damaged the world environment and are a major contributor to a climate transformation that could render Earth as unlivable as Venus.

To believe Lorenzo is to believe that cars are somehow needed for human happiness and fulfillment. Utter nonsense, the result of lifelong indoctrination in a car-centric culture. I've found a much stronger sense of freedom on a bicycle, horseback, or on my own two feet than in a car.

The cowboys of the Old West didn't have cars, but they were freer than you car cultists could ever dream of.

But I know you car lovers. Only your cold, dead hands will let go of that steering wheel---that steering wheel to Nowheresville.

[lorenzo]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Heineken', '
')To believe Lorenzo is to believe that cars are somehow needed for human happiness and fulfillment. Utter nonsense, the result of lifelong indoctrination in a car-centric culture. I've found a much stronger sense of freedom on a bicycle, horseback, or on my own two feet than in a car.

[rwwff]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('lorenzo', 'T')he car as such is a tool that opens up a new culture and that launches a new series of behavioral instincts in man: the work ethic, individualism, consumerism, the idea of modernity itself.

[Heineken]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('lorenzo', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Heineken', '
')To believe Lorenzo is to believe that cars are somehow needed for human happiness and fulfillment. Utter nonsense, the result of lifelong indoctrination in a car-centric culture. I've found a much stronger sense of freedom on a bicycle, horseback, or on my own two feet than in a car.

[gg3]

There is a peculiar irony about a culture that is simultaneously trumpeting progress in technology whilst falling into a pre-enlightenment medievalist mentality that includes end-times eschatology embraced with gusto.

---

That being said, cars good, cars bad, this arguement gets boring after a while. The arguement is not about a machine, it's about a myth, a "complex equivalent" whose meanings vary so widely that they fail to overlap. The bickering and bitching is about the gap between the myths.

As long as each side of the arguement seeks to sell myths, and not transportation itself, we're going to get exactly nowhere.

---

Meanwhile, the autoX prize seems like a good idea. No doubt VW will step up to the plate with their 285 to 300 mpg prototype, and we shall see who else comes forward.

[Heineken]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('gg3', 'T')here is a peculiar irony about a culture that is simultaneously trumpeting progress in technology whilst falling into a pre-enlightenment medievalist mentality that includes end-times eschatology embraced with gusto.

---

That being said, cars good, cars bad, this arguement gets boring after a while. The arguement is not about a machine, it's about a myth, a "complex equivalent" whose meanings vary so widely that they fail to overlap. The bickering and bitching is about the gap between the myths.

As long as each side of the arguement seeks to sell myths, and not transportation itself, we're going to get exactly nowhere.

---

Meanwhile, the autoX prize seems like a good idea. No doubt VW will step up to the plate with their 285 to 300 mpg prototype, and we shall see who else comes forward.

[spudbuddy]

Well, let's start with the 70% of the North American population who live suburban and exurbanized enough to require serious address to how necessary their vehicular travel actually is.
Reducing their gas consumption by 75-80% would not be a bad thing.
For starters.

If someone in middle school starts to smarten up, begins to think that academia isn't just for nerds, and subsequently builds up an educational "equity" over the next 10 years of their life that eventually leads to an MA or a doctorate, it follows that whatever contempt they had for education when they were adolescent and foolish matters not a wit.
Same argument.

We've obviously been stupid with cars, so let's get smarter.
We obviously need to re-design our infrastructure, so let's buy some time to do it in.
Just as that kid isn't going to go from grade six and academic-rejectionist - to the dean's list.......we're not going to go instantly from autopia and all its attendant foolishness to Smartworld overnight.

The fact that we were actually more energy-efficient 30 years ago should provoke some sobering thought. Greed is entirely what shifted us from then to now.
And I wouldn't wait around for benign corporate intervention...this baby requires a strong public will driving the political machine.
Two, or three, or four or five hundred mpg isn't going to save our souls for that "American way of life" - so non-negotiable.
It just might, on the other hand, ease off on some of the more serious ills that trouble our planet.

You can hate cars to death, or love them to bits - it's your choice.
What an exercise in democracy!
The point is that someone beyond the lovers and haters has to inspire the movers and shakers to actually shift the whole damned thing.

What was that bit about.....who was it said....."give me a fulcrum and I'll move the world" ?

[Heineken]

A reasonable set of comments, spudbuddy, but in the end I think reason will have nothing to do with the car's future. That future will be forced by wrenching events beyond our control. Basically, there is no future for the 2500-lb personal vehicle, any more than there is a future for the 4000-square-foot McMansion.

[lorenzo]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Heineken', 'B')asically, there is no future for the 2500-lb personal vehicle

[Heineken]

It isn't just about automobile mileage, Lorenzo. It's about the vast infrastructure that cars require and the ghastly feeding chain they support. A way of life that, as Kunstler notes, has no future.

You don't just have to shrink the car, you have to shrink the rest of it too.