Early Contenders for the Automotive X-Prize 309
longacre writes "With the official entry period for the $10 million Automotive X-Prize contest just around the corner, Popular Mechanics offers a preview of the most promising entries. Among the 100-mpg vehicles that Detroit (and Japan) have claimed impossible to build comes a hybrid designed by a class of inner-city high school students in West Philadelphia. Also displayed is a futuristic-looking electric model with a range of 300 miles. We discussed the beginning of this contest earlier this year."
boobs? (Score:0, Interesting)
Re:Love the snark... not (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, it's not for everyone. With only 2+1 seating, it's not a "family car" (although their next model will seat more people); it's a commuter car. But as far as commuter cars go, I think it's a beautiful design. I can't wait to test drive it (test drives and factory tours are to start this summer).
Re:Love the snark... not (Score:5, Interesting)
Well then perhaps they should start with the automakers that make over sized Soccer-Mom Assault Vehicles and over powered Impotence Compensators. The trend towards ever larger and more powerful cars is what is increasing the danger of our roads. [berkeley.edu] The gains made by auto safety improvements has only served to As Click and Clack pointed out in a recent Nova show about the "Car of the Future", no commuter needs 500hp, and that is ridiculous to even offer it. [newscientist.com] Automakers will be quick to point out that consumers (as a broad trend) buy the most horsepower they can afford for the car type they buy. But huge monster cars are not a true necessity for a car to be a success. Lets look at one of the most successful cars of all time. The 1967 VW Beetle weighed 1850lbs and had 53hp, [wikipedia.org] and they worked just fine. With modern techniques it should be easy enough to make a vehicle with enough room, with a curb weight of under a ton. Then a simple 75 hp engine can get you where you are going just fine. There is no need to go 0-60 in under ten seconds if most cars on the road do it in fifteen seconds. Perhaps if there were tighter regulations on vehicle size (without a special license) and size to horsepower ratio limits, then there would be more room for innovative cars like the Aptera. Structural engineering of cars is really only half the crash test, the other half is the size of the other car they collide with.
And getting all of those SUVs off the road is easy, it's called $10-a-gallon gas.
Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, I remember reading about several such contenders in magazines such as, well, Popular Mechanics, and they never materialize.
In fact, what's with mileage going DOWN over the last 15 years? Why do I have to buy a hybrid to get a 35MPG Altima, when I owned a 6-cylinder '95 Intrepid with a 3.5L V6 just a few years ago that got a measly 35MPG when I drove with a lead foot? Who do they think they're fooling?
People, you may be mad about the price of gas, but you should be a lot madder.
Bicycle Beats Them All (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyways, go to google maps, right-click on where you live and select "Directions from here" then right-click on where you work and select "Directions to here". If the result is less than 5mi, you should be biking to work.
Help the planet, help the country, help yourself, ride a bike.
http://www.bikeleague.org/resources/why/environment.php [bikeleague.org]
Exxon and Detroit are Not to Blame. (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, what's with mileage going DOWN over the last 15 years?
Look at the horsepower. Given the same engine size and roughly the same fuel, for the most part,additional efficiency has been applied to produce more horsepower to the engine. In the 1980s and even into the 1990s, fuel efficient cars were so utterly anemic that the best thing to do to get any kind of performance would be to buy a truck or a 1970s muscle car.
No more.
Nowadays, you've got 4 cylinder engines supercharged up to 300hp, and GM's new V6 in the Caddy CTS is a naturally aspirated 6 that makes the same horsepower as the V8. If you want a V8, you are usually talking at least 350 hp to start, going all the way up to 500 or even close to 600 hp once you put a blower on it.
Just look at the 0-60 times. First 7 seconds was good for a stock car, then 6, and now mid 5's are common. A supercar gets you to the speed limit in 3 seconds.
Speed sells. People like to go fast and accelerate quickly, and that is what car makers made.
Most people aren't mad about the price of gasoline, except in a bitter sense, because they intuitively know that Detroit didn't victimize them - 35mpg cars have been there all along, and they know it wasn't some crazy oil conspiracy. Rather, they know it was their own dumb fault for buying a gas guzzling vehicle when we should have learned having been burnt by this first in 1973, then 1979, and certainly we would be burned again.
The thing is, yeah, the price of gas sucks. But everyone knows that the pandering by all of the candidates is not the real solution. I mean, sure , idiots can rise up like Obama blaming the "oil companies", or almost as nearly as bad, McCain trying to get the gas tax repealed, but, if you ask most people if they would rather have just drilled the shit out of the country to get every last drop of oil, turned Colorado into looking like the moon in order to get all the shale, many, shockingly, (and I would almost say foolishly) would rather preserve the environment. I guarantee you, if you really wanted to lower the price of fuel, you could put in the right environmental waivers and tax breaks, blow off global warming, and we'd be back to about $2/gallon gasoline within 3 years.
Really, most Americans intuitively know that they need to get out of their low mileage vehicles, and get higher mileage vehicles, if they are so pissed off about fuel. For some, its the environment and concerns over global warming. For some, cars aren't mystical beautiful things, just transportation and they'll consider the train. For some, its a racial hatred of arabs and a political hatred of chavez. So really, no matter how you arrive at it, a bit of conservation either saves the planet, screws the arabs, and saves some money, so, really, it's all good.
This isn't stuff we didn't know about before, but we know that now is the time to get on it.
Re:Math (Score:5, Interesting)
I assumed anyone at slashdot could take the math the rest of the way and apply it to their situation but apparently you need some help with yer figuring.
Clearly you're not in finance. All of these mathematical calculations are wrong in the face of finance. By finance I'm not talking the terms banks and lenders throw around as a verb, I'm talking about the finance department of any company to compute the feasibility of a project or investment. For example everyone likes to use the "pay back period" as a financially sound way to compare two projects when it ignores a critical factor: the time value of money.
So now you claim the original post not to "take the math the rest of the way" when you've clearly got some issues in your math. To settle this, I'll do a decent job in taking the math all the way by giving you a fairly sound financial computation on net present value. I'm no finance person, but I've been in accounting and finance classes to know that your calculations are wrong and there are better ways. So since you asked, here is your math problem solved correctly.
There are two common ways to compare to streams of cash flows financially: internal rate of return, and net present value. The easier one to understand (and also with fewer math issues) is net present value. All net present value is is taking a stream of cash flows and calculating their values in dollars at the current point in time. As you know, a dollar today is not worth the same amount as a dollar next year due to inflation and other things. Net present value accounts for this by introducing the risk free interest rate into the equation so that you can get two sums of money to compare at a single point in time.
Before I go further, I need to say that dividing the fixed investment cost and time zero (today) over the lifetime of the investment is wrong for time value of money reasons. That is when you buy a car in pure cash today, you cannot receive the benefit of reinvesting that cash because it is gone! What you can do is say you spent X dollars at time zero and if at the end of the useful life, you sell the asset, then you will receive some money back but quite a bit less due to depreciation and market value at the point of sale.
In order to compute the net present value, all you have to do is take the present value of each year or month's cash flow and compute the present value of that item. So for example let's assume the risk free rate is 2.5% and because we don't care about the rate of return (this is not really an investment to make money, but to save money and fill a need), all we care about is the risk free rate. So today a dollar is worth $1. Next year the same dollar invested today will be worth $1 * (1.025 ^ 1) = $1.025. (You can also think in the other direction and say that a dollar in the future by one year is worth $1 / (1.025 ^ 1) ~ $0.97561 today.) As you might guess, a dollar invested today will be worth $1 * (1.025 ^ 2) = $1.050625. If we keep doing this for 5 years, the factors for each year are:
So let's do the real financial math to compare costs. In order to do this, we need to compute how our cash will flow for each investment. I will reduce the calculations to years since it is easier to show, but you could also do the calculations compounded by month if you wish by dividing the interest rate by 12 and recomputing the multipliers on a monthly basis (or use Excel's net present value function hint hint). We will also assume that both cars depreciate at a rate of 20% a year so in 5 years, they will be worth (1 - 0.20) ^ 5 = 32.768% of their initial value and we will find a buyer that is willing to pay that exact value for the asset at the end of the year. That means after 5 years we will sell the econobox at $4,915 (rounding off 20 cents) and the Aptera at $8,683 (rounding off 52 cent
Re:Still (Score:3, Interesting)
The modern common rail diesel engines are also more efficient than the older "Pumpe-Düse" engines that VW used back when they built the A2 and Lupo. So, VW has everything in their parts bin that they need to make a 100 MPG highway car.
It just wouldn't sell.
Re:Go Aptera! (Score:3, Interesting)
Back to commuter rail, the point of having the commuter rail start in Leander is to get those folks off of 183/183A and Mopac. You are correct that as of today, there are not that many people there. However, Leander is building a 2300 acre "transit-oriented development" near the rail to entice folks to ride. So, you could live in the burbs and get downtown in a reasonable amount of time (45 minutes vs 90). People are going to keep moving to Leander, Cedar Park, etc., NO MATTER WHAT. But it would be nice to keep them off Mopac, etc.
I live in NW Austin and I am going to give rail a shot. One kicker is they haven't said how much fares will cost yet.
-l
P.s., personally, I love people-mover technology. You drive a munchkin car. It gets slurped up into a fast (70mph) rail line. You tell it where you want off, and it spits out your car onto your exit. There are a lot of moving parts, though, and I don't think engineering-wise it'll ever be feasible.