Automotive X Prize News: March 9th, 2008

Plenty: $10M up for grabs in international green car competition, featuring Fuel Vapor Technologies, Kinetic Vehicles, Visionary Vehicles.

Tesla talks traction control and Tesla Roadster is not a converted Lotus Elise.

Review of Electric Smart Car, during which they use a commercial portable generator to basically convert the car into an E-REV. This piqued the curiosity of some readers, including me, and I did some additional research. Turns out it's not an original idea, in fact Toyota did a project with the RAV4-EV: Rav Long Ranger Hybridizing Trailer. And, you can do the same yourself, like these people did: Interfacing the Manzanita Micro PFC-50 to the Toyota RAV4-EV (PDF), scroll to the bottom to see a Coleman Professional 11000 portable generator attached like a bike rack to the back of their RAV4-EV, charging the car via the (retrofitted) PFC-50 on-board charger. The big downside to this from a competition standpoint is that these commercial generators are typically very large and heavy compared to the needs of a real E-REV. The Coleman generates only 11kW, weighs over 300 lbs, and is 31"x21"x27" in size.

Now some green car news:

I found a cool website with projects centering on the Honda Insight: 99MPG.com, including a 5th electric powered wheel which lowers from the trunk, a solar power module, a "manual integrated motor assist" controller to give better control over when the electricity is used, and a retrofit with Prius systems.

Lumeneo Smera, a 4-wheel single seat tilting EV, with nice stats, but they don't provide enough info to estimate it's MPGe. According to the website, it gets 150 km range on 10 kWh, which translates to 317 MPGe. Not to shabby!

Th!nk announced the Ox, a 5-seat electric car. 60kW electric motor, 3300 lbs, 0-60 in 8.5 seconds, 120 miles on a lithium batteries. No word on cost or availability date. Thi!nk also signed a deal with A123 Systems for li-ion batteries.

Fisker sports car runs for a year on one tank of petrol, assuming of course you never go further than 50 miles in a day...

There was lots more news this week about the diesel-hybrid VW Golf TDI: Treehugger, Green Car Congress.