No Public Races!

At a press event at the Auto Show in Detroit (pictured), the PIAXP team unveiled the new Competition Timeline, still showing the same September end date. But, in what I had actually come to suspect was going to happen, they have removed all excitement from the prize: there will be no race across Manhattan, no race between Vancouver and Seattle, no race at the Indianapolis Speedway, in fact no public races at all!

What is left in the schedule is some shakedown safety testing, some "closed door" track testing at the Michigan International Speedway (MIS) -- where "speed will be important" (can you hear the excitement) -- and finally some dynamometer testing. The big opportunity for the public will be a one day open house at the MIS in July, although apparently this will focus on the DASH+ high school student competition ("design the dashboard of the future and you can win!"), and only have a few of the PIAXP cars present.

That's not what I signed up for, and I imagine many of the recent big team losses are related to this - surely the teams had inside knowledge on the direction the prize is going. The big problem with this new timeline is that the prize will likely never enter the mainstream with this schedule. I talk to a lot of people about the Automotive X Prize, and the number of people who have heard about it is TINY, <1%, regardless of how informed the person should theoretically be (neither technical people nor greenies know about it, even if they are knowledgeable about the previous X Prize). For well over a year, I've been comforting myself with the knowledge that once they shut down parts of Manhattan and race odd looking cars, this thing would hit the public big time. But apparently, that future event is not going to happen, in fact no public race will happen at all.

The best we can hope for now is that the final press event announcing the $10M winners makes a big splash, because it's clear to me that nothing else in the timeline will. The new competition is boring.

On the bright side, there is some nice new eye-candy: the PIAXP team has released two "Teams Banners", which contain a picture and a little bit of information about all 39 teams. You can download high-res versions in a .zip.

See also coverage by Autoblog Green (including informative interview of Eric Cahill) and Wired Autopia. Apparently these changes are all about how to make the competition simpler and cheaper to do. At one point Eric talks about how the MIS will allow them to "simulate city driving". Simulate! That's the new Automotive X Prize...