Contests like the X Prize use the power of prize to throw the doors open on a problem to get all of us, or some among all of us, to go to work on a solution. (The secrets of crafting a prize are revealed by X Prize Founder Peter Diamandis here). The Automotive X Prize will award $10 million this year to the team that best addresses the challenge of developing a production scale vehicle that gets a least 100 miles per gallon.
So, what might an Automotive X Prize 2015 winner look like? Poking around on the internet, here's some promising stuff that might fructify in that car five years hence:
Hypercar The 2015 winner will be light and aerodynamic, following RMI's Hypercar principles.
Battery Skin Researchers at the Imperial College London are looking into storing energy in the skin of the car, using a "composite of carbon fibers and a polymer resin which can store and discharge large amounts of energy much faster than conventional batteries." The skin does double duty: its conventional functions like shedding water and maintaining temperature, but also energy storage, allowing the car to shed heavy battery weight.
Solar Skin The skin chips in to produce some of the car's energy, using photo-voltaics like Mercedes Benz' concept car Formula Zero, Cambridge University's Bethany, or some future paintable PV technology.
Increasingly, the electric car will be defined by its supporting infrastructure: the roads, the places it parks, the web-based world it engages, sources outside the physical boundary of the car itself that provide power. So here are some of the extra-car features of the X-Prize car of the future:
Plugless Charging When the car needs to draw energy, it uses proximity charging, eliminating the twice or thrice weekly stop at the gas station; in fact, eliminating any effort by the driver to refuel the vehicle.
Road Charging. Renewables. Conductors (and billing technology) embedded in roads to charge the vehicle (and its owner) while driving. Maybe road charging provides a way to use energy created by industrial scale renewables closer to the renewables' sparsely inhabited (or uninhabited) sites: long stretches of sunny or windy roads in the West and mid-West, roads near large bodies of water that produce energy from wind, tides, currents, thermal, saline gradient. An interesting inversion of the current electrical distribution model: bring the user to the production source. Yet another opportunity to smooth and balance the demand and supply curves for electrical power.
Smart Charging The electric car will capitalize on GPS, web and Smart Grid technologies to wring efficiency from its operation and up the convenience and comfort factor for its users. Finding and securing parking in crowded downtowns, pre-heating or cooling the car with instructions from a smart phone, charging when power rates are cheapest...actually these technologies will be available in 2010's electric cars, see this teaser video from Nissan.
So tell us, potential 2015 X-Prizers, what else?
Photo: zelnunes on flickr
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