Green Options

The Progressive Automotive X-Prize, closing in on its May 2010 competition start date, held a technical summit of the participating 43 teams at the 2009 SEMA show in Las Vegas. Twelve of those teams brought along vehicles to display at the show, each one in varying degrees of completeness.

This post is an excerpt of an article from Popular Mechanics. You can read the full post on their website. Written by Ben Stewart.

File this one under “weaksauce”. After trying to cut research funding by hundreds of millions for hydrogen technology (most of which was restored by Congress), the Department of Energy has announced a $1 million prize for a hydrogen technology breakthrough. The contest seeks an entry that will improve current hydrogen storage issues, involving highly-pressurized tanks.

But plenty of rules, red tape, and a short deadline may shortchange this contest of its best entrants.

This post comes to you from Popular Mechanics. Written By Seth Porges.

Across the country, a handful of car makers continue their quest to bring a market-ready mega-mileage machine to market. The prize: $7.5 million from the X Prize Foundation. Unfortunately for X Prize followers, the New York Auto Show is not shaping up to be much of a battlefield. There is one exception: On Thursday, EV Innovations will unveil the Wave, a curvacious plug-in electric two-seater that the company claims will have a range of up to 200 miles, a top speed of around 80 mph, and start just north of $30,000 when it becomes available to consumers in 2010.

A lot more good green news comes out every day than any one person — or even one Website — can keep up with. While we can’t cover it all, following are a few of the previous week’s news stories worth mentioning:

• Making its debut at the TED (”Technology, Entertainment, Design”) conference in California this week: the Mission One all-electric, super-sporty and zero-emissions motorcycle that can go up to 150 miles per hour;

UC Irvine students Kyle Good and Bryan Le have come with the next X PRIZE challenge: build an ultracapacitor. The pair won the X PRIZE Foundation’s “What’s Your Crazy Green Idea” contest, which asked entrants to post a 2 minute video describing a concept for an X PRIZE in the Energy and Environment category. Le and Good won $25,000 for their idea. The winning video is below.

While it’s not be the $10 million prize that that the X PRIZE Foundation awards for some of its other competitions, $25,000 is still a nice chuck of change. And it’s up for grabs in the X PRIZE “What’s Your Crazy Green Idea?” Video Contest on YouTube.

It’s no secret that you can waste many an hour on YouTube. A lot of what is posted there is pretty mindless - entertaining, but mindless. Now the X PRIZE Foundation is making good use of the online video website by asking users to figure out how to benefit humanity through their “crazy green ideas.”

Competitors can submit videos to the contest via YouTube and a $25,000 prize will be awarded for “the best video proposing a new, world-changing X PRIZE in the field of Energy and the Environment.” The submitted videos must be 2 minute long and answer these three questions:

1. What is the specific prize idea?
2. What is the Grand Challenge or world-wide problem that you are trying to solve?
3. How will this prize benefit humanity?

Editor’s note: This week, Ecotality’s Bill Hobbs takes a look at the Automotive X-Prize, a competition to develop a 100mpg automobile. This post was originally published on August 2, 2007.

The Automotive X-Prize has announced the first 31 teams accepted into their competition to create a commercially viable car that gets at least 100mpg. Among the teams accepted: Tesla Motors, Zap, Phoenix Motorcars, Fuel Vapor Technology and Team Velozzi. According to

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