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" There were no hospitality suites or luxury motor coaches in the infield, and cocktails weren&amp;#039;t served. The food came wrapped in plastic and was eaten standing up. Glamour was in short supply, but the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize Shakedown sessions were car-geek nirvana. And the teams gathered at the Michigan International Speedway early this past summer were there to make history. The $10 million in prizes seemed almost incidental. Forget the press releases saying the X Prize is about inspiring &amp;quot;a new generation of viable, safe, affordable and super-fuel-efficient vehicles.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s one of the longest and most grueling automotive competitions ever staged. For Chris Beebe&amp;#039;s team, however, the chase was over. Like most of the teams competing for the X Prize, his Team FourSight had spent that beautiful early May day scrambling to get their vehicle through tech inspection and preliminary testing. But now, as the sun set over the empty grandstands, the veteran mechanic was sitting in a lawn chair outside his team&amp;#039;s garage sketching technical drawings. He and his exhausted crew were punting\u2014throwing together a last-second appeal to get their just-disqualified TwinSight electric car back into the competition. &amp;quot;We knew we were way behind,&amp;quot; Beebe said as he drew a proposed canopy. &amp;quot;We just thought there would be some leniency, and there&amp;#039;s showing to be none.&amp;quot; Mercy isn&amp;#039;t part of the Automotive X Prize. It&amp;#039;s a stout contest. After all, the technological challenge is monu\u00ADmental\u2014\u00ADdesigning production-ready, market-attractive, affordable cars that get the equivalent of 100 mpg (based on a gallon of gas containing 115,000 Btu of energy), meet or beat current emissions regulations and have a range of up to 200 miles. And behind that has to be a solid business plan to produce 10,000 of them before 2014. By comparison, Burt Rutan had it easy: To win the \u00ADAnsari X Prize in 2004, all he had to do was get his spacecraft into outer space twice in two weeks. &amp;quot;The X Prize is difficult,&amp;quot; says Dr. Peter Diamandis, 49, who started the X Prize Foundation and still leads it. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a $10 million competition. It&amp;#039;s what Lindbergh did in crossing the Atlantic.&amp;quot; What Lindbergh chased (and captured in 1927) was the $25,000 Orteig Prize for a nonstop flight between New York and Paris. Diamandis revived the Orteig Prize&amp;#039;s spirit in 1996 with the creation of the $10 million Ansari X Prize. After Rutan&amp;#039;s win, &amp;quot;reinventing the car seemed the next natural challenge,&amp;quot; Diamandis says. When registration closed for the event in February 2009, 111 teams from around the globe had signed up. By June 2009, 97 of them had submitted proposals for evaluation and qualification. In October, 43 teams were invited to enter the competition. &amp;quot;There was one team that submitted a 642-page PowerPoint presentation,&amp;quot; says Steve Wesoloski, Automotive X Prize director of technical operations. &amp;quot;They pulled in all different areas from grad school and just jammed it into a presentation. They had no real plan to get a vehicle here, let alone go to production. They were eliminated.&amp;quot;  Conspicuous in its absence was any major American-market carmaker. GM didn&amp;#039;t bring the Chevrolet Volt, Nissan left the Leaf at home, and even Tesla chose to keep its vehicles in their stalls. &amp;quot;The risk/reward equation wasn&amp;#039;t right for them,&amp;quot; Diamandis explains. &amp;quot;If they competed and lost, that was a black eye. If they won, people would say, &amp;#039;Why didn&amp;#039;t you do this before the competition?&amp;#039;&amp;quot; &amp;amp;gt;  --&amp;amp;gt;  --&amp;amp;gt;  The teams that did enter aren&amp;#039;t from big research labs doing fundamental investigations into new battery materials, far-horizon fuels or Jetsons-spec antigravity systems. And they&amp;#039;re not jokesters showing up with rubber-band-powered balsa cars or sailboards on skateboard wheels. They&amp;#039;re startups like Aptera, small companies like Zap looking to expand their business, educational institutions like Cornell University, and some teams that amount to not much more than a group of friends with a dream, a pole barn and room enough on their credit cards. The one big manufacturer to show up\u2014in a super-low-key way\u2014was India&amp;#039;s Tata. They&amp;#039;re taking proven technologies like off-the-shelf batteries, electric motors and controllers and pushing them (and often themselves) to the limits. There are three Automotive X Prize classes, each with similar rules. Mainstream-class cars are meant to be similar to what we drive today. They must accommodate four people and have at least four wheels and at least 10 cubic feet of cargo space. They must also accelerate to 60 mph in under 15 seconds and pull at least 0.70 g&amp;#039;s on a skidpad. The toughest nut to crack, however, is the 200-mile range over a mix of city and highway driving. The winner, if there is one, gets $5 million.  The Alternative class is looser and divided into two subcategories based on seating position. The side-by-side class positions two passengers conventionally, while the tandem cars seat the passenger behind the driver, fighter-\u00ADjet style. These cars can have any number of wheels and need a mere 100-mile range. Each winner of the two Alternative subclasses walks off with a check for $2.5 million. All the other teams get a set of steak knives. Okay, that was a joke. They don&amp;#039;t even get steak knives. In four rounds of competition spread over five months (this past April through August), the X Prize&amp;#039;s ad hoc staff of inspectors and judges evaluated each entry, looking for cars that met the competition&amp;#039;s criteria. After objective and subjective judging, the car(s)\u2014if any\u2014that did all of the above most effectively would take home the big check(s).  In late April and \u00ADearly May 2010, the competition began in earnest as most of the qualified teams attended one of two Shakedown rounds at the speedway. This first round wasn&amp;#039;t supposed to be a competition. But it was.  &amp;quot;They said this wasn&amp;#039;t a knockout round,&amp;quot; said one young member of the student-staffed team from Western Washington University at the first Shakedown event. &amp;quot;But they&amp;#039;re all knockout rounds. And I think we&amp;#039;re in trouble.&amp;quot; On the official X Prize website, the rules specifically state that &amp;quot;The purpose of this first stage is to conduct safety inspections and on-track dynamic safety evaluations of competition vehicles. Teams must submit their cars to on-the-ground chal\u00ADlenges for the purpose of shaking out problem areas and preparing their vehicles for the Knockout Qualifying Stage that follows, all without risk of elimination by the judges.&amp;quot; But the judges were in fact eliminating entries that seemed, to them, hopelessly unprepared or unsafe. And that unexpected pressure to perform had the garages smelling of sweat, solder and slightly moldy Subway foot-longs. Not all the teams were scrambling\u2014the Aptera team almost appeared to be napping\u2014but most had too much work to do and not enough people, and time was running out. WWU&amp;#039;s entry, for example, is an advanced hybrid two-seater built around a carbon-fiber tub and suspension components. &amp;quot;The big challenge is getting it done,&amp;quot; said Andrew Brady, one of the students slaving away on it. &amp;quot;Six months ago it was a bare chassis. But simply getting to that step was a couple-\u00ADyear process. We also built a prototype car with the same chassis that we use for testing.&amp;quot; Most of the day, the WWU car was covered in students determined to make sure that the first-generation Honda Insight\u2013based drivetrain was working and that everything was battened down. But the judges had issues. They didn&amp;#039;t think the electrical system was properly grounded. They wanted a more rigid fire-extinguisher mount. And they weren&amp;#039;t pleased that seats were integral to the car&amp;#039;s structure. &amp;amp;gt;  --&amp;amp;gt;  --&amp;amp;gt;  &amp;quot;Ground faults. That&amp;#039;s the biggest thing we&amp;#039;re catching everyone on,&amp;quot; technical director Wesoloski said. &amp;quot;It seems like that&amp;#039;s one item that several teams have been held up on in inspection. If they don&amp;#039;t have safety devices installed properly or have them installed at all, then we&amp;#039;re not allowing them on the track, just because it&amp;#039;s not a safe situation.&amp;quot; No one was talking much in the garages; no one was playing music. The most prominent sounds were whirring engines, sparking welders, the clack of laptop keyboards and the occasional empty 5-Hour Energy drink bottle hitting the bottom of a trash can. Screen-printed team T-shirts and $8 haircuts were the common uniform. However, Zap did bring along Keiko, a leggy model in a skirt and high heels, to accompany its vehicle. Of the 26 teams that showed up for Shakedowns, 22 of them, fielding 28 cars, passed the inspections and on-track performance tests to proceed to late June&amp;#039;s Knockout round, where the competition intensified and more teams were eliminated. WWU snuck through with a &amp;quot;probationary&amp;quot; pass, but Team FourSight&amp;#039;s appeal didn&amp;#039;t sway the inspectors and it was disqualified, along with three other teams.  Those who survived the Knockout went back to the speedway in July for the Finals round, where they repeated all they had done before and then faced another fresh set of challenges. These included a &amp;quot;coast-down&amp;quot; test that generated aerodynamic and rolling-\u00ADresistance data that will be used in the dynamometer-based Validation stage in August at the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago. After a month of chewing on the objective data, evaluating the business plans and assessing the consumer attractiveness of the remaining vehicles, the X Prizes will be awarded in September, at an event in Washington, D.C. After that, who knows? At least a couple of these cars\u2014the Aptera, the Zap\u2014will soon be available. But the event has sparked even greater interest in efficient transportation, a result that makes the sweaty late nights, skinned knuckles and fried batteries worthwhile investments. &amp;amp;gt; The Physics of Fuel Economy &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/hybrid-electric/a6080/behind-the-scenes-of-the-auto-x-prize/>