A very light car powered by an internal combustion engine (and fueled by a standard gasoline-ethanol blend known as E85) won the $5 million purse today in the Progressive Automotive X Prize—proving you don’t need an electric vehicle to get over 100 mpg.
The nonprofit X Prize Foundation and Progressive Insurance, which sponsored the automotive incentive prize, named the Edison2 from Charlottesville, VA, as the mainstream class winner in a ceremony today at the Historical Society of Washington D.C. The sponsors also awarded $2.5 million apiece to winning entries in two other categories—The Li-ion Motors team from Mooresville, NC, was the winner in the automotive design category requiring a driver and passenger sit side-by-side; and the X-Tracer team from Winterthur, Switzerland, won for its E-Tracer entry in the tandem category for hybrid motorcycle-automotive designs.
The three winners emerged from 136 vehicle entries submitted by 111 teams from around the world. The Progressive Automotive X PRIZE was launched in 2008 to spur the development of a new generation of viable, safe and super fuel-efficient vehicles capable of achieving the energy equivalent of at least 100 miles per gallon. The evaluation process included on-track testing at the Michigan International Speedway, which included dynamic safety testing by Consumer Reports, and laboratory verification by the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory. The X Prize provided these details about each of the three winners:
$5 Million Mainstream Class Winner
Economy: 102.5 MPGe (miles per gallon equivalent)
Fuel: E85 ethanol
Edison2 showed the lowest drag coefficient of any car with four wheels tested in the GM wind tunnel and at the Chrysler Proving Grounds. Its low weight of
