Las Vegan competes to build green car
During 2008, the XPrize Foundation joined with Progressive Insurance to sponsor a $10 million competition to inspire the growth of a clean energy automotive industry. Since 1996 when the XPrize was born, the foundation has offered prizes for competitive challenges in the areas of exploration, life sciences, energy, environment, education and global development.
The competition would have a limited timeline of three years for competing teams who would have to deliver the best fuel-efficient automotive design by September 2010.
The combination of technologies in the competing vehicles must exhibit the capability of achieving a 100-miles-per-gallon energy equivalent. These vehicles must also meet automotive industry manufacturing requirements for price, size, capacity, safety and performance, and should be attractive vehicles that consumers would want to buy.
One local Las Vegas resident, Carolyn Johnson, has been actively involved in the Progressive Insurance XPrize competition. Johnson is an environmental officer at the Las Vegas Valley Water District.
Johnson is also president of Eltra Technology Inc., an innovative Illinois-based design company that has been adapting its multipartitioned electric motor products for hybrid-electric cars and electric bicycles since 1994. Its management team has focused on developing innovative flexible-fuel drivetrains that work with the company’s patented electric-motor designs to extend electric vehicle range.
Despite a limited budget, the Eltra Technology’s prototype hybrid gasoline-electric car survived several engineering design evaluation cuts during the last two years of the XPrize competition, shrinking the field of competitors from hundreds of early entrants down to 41 teams, going into the first quarter of 2010.
However, this time around, a long obstacle course of requirements became very daunting for the Eltra Technology team to navigate and surmount, including rigorous reviews of the company’s business plan and technical design specifications.
Going into the April and May “shakedown stage,” the qualified field has now shrunk to just 28 teams and Eltra Technology Inc. is not one of them.
During June, the “knockout qualifying stage” will cut the field again, down to less than 25 teams. The “finals stage” in July will trim the field once more to less than 20 teams and then the Validation Stage in August will whittle the last remaining members of the field down to less than 15 teams. The three final winners will be announced in September.
Some of the remaining teams are recognizable alternative-fuel vehicle companies such as Amp, Aptera, Tango (Commuter Cars), Tata Motors and Zap Motors. The remaining field also includes university academic research programs as well as international competitors from Canada, the UK, China, India, Thailand, Switzerland and Germany.
In 1996, Peter Diamandis announced the creation of the XPrize Foundation and offered $10 million to the first team of civilian astronauts who could develop a reuseable rocket plane that could, within two weeks time, fly twice beyond the boundaries of the Earth’s atmosphere to exceed an altitude of 63 miles high.
Eight years later, the Ansari XPrize was won by Mojave Aerospace Ventures. Its rocket plane, SpaceShipOne, was launched from its mothership, White Knight, in midair and was piloted twice into suborbital outer space before returning home to its spaceport in Mojave, Calif.
Stan Hanel has worked in the electronics industry for more than 30 years and is a long-time member of the Electric Auto Association and the Las Vegas Electric Vehicle Association. Hanel writes and edits for EAA’s “Current Events” and LVEVA’s “Watts Happening” newsletters. Contact him at stanhanel@aol.com.