Citizen Power

My mission is simple:  Find the coolest car with the best mileage that is so affordable I can still afford solar panels on my roof next year.  Impossible?  Yes.  But it’s fun to look at dream cars anyway.  Here’s a candidate.  (The problem with the best cars is that no one is making them quite yet.)  The car pictured here runs on gas fumes.  I beat them to it — while I was in college I drove my car nearly everywhere on gas fumes.  But it didn’t get very good mileage.

This car somehow makes it work.  (It also looks like it’s made out of plastic).

There is another car, highlighted in this article , that is so thin it can rival motorcycles for parking spaces. And the oddest sounding is the Air Car.  It supposedly runs on air.  All of these cars are entered in a contest for the Progressive Automotive X Prize.  It’s an international competition with a prize of $10 million to see which car can actually be driven regularly and get 100mpg.   My question is:  if these cars work as promised, wouldn’t some car company pay them that much for the patent?  And if they work as promised, I would think they’d be worth a lot more than $10 million.  A car that runs on air is the equivalent of the perpetual motion machine. It sounds too good to be true and it probably is, but if it isn’t . . . . think of the possibilities.  Naturally, none of the major car U.S. manufacturers are entering the contest.   And the reason I looked this up in the first place is that a radio show had a guest on it last week who was talking about how Europe already has 100mpg cars. How can that be true, when we have nothing close?

I’m no engineer and I know next to nothing about the workings of a car. I once poured hot water all over the engine of my car when it was 20 degrees below zero outside just to get it to start.  I didn’t even know that you aren’t supposed to do that. So, my knowledge is thin and my main requirements for a new car are above, and I would also like to add that my dream car has to  start when it’s very cold out. I think our winters of the temps being 20 below zero are numbered (and they are already down to less than 5 days per year) but people still want a dependable car, even if it can run miraculously on air or gas fumes. Imagine if someone could invent a car that could run on pollution and smog — sucking it out of the air as it used it to run.

The contest begins in September and requires the contestants to be driven around enough so that the claim of getting 100mpg can be proven.  They will also race, for some reason. I have never liked watching car races and in fact I hate them, but a lot of people seem to like seeing cars go around and around a track.

Oddly enough, a critic of the contest says it’s been done already.  Yet the car that did accomplished this is no longer being made.

“But some automakers say the competition is passé. Volkswagen has chosen not to participate.

“In 2001, we put a European Lupo3L hypereconomy car through the now-archaic EPA testing and got 80 miles per gallon in the city and 100 on the highway,” says Keith Price, the public relations manager. “So in terms of the X Prize, we wish them well but from our perspective, we’ve been there, done that.”

The Lupo is no longer in production.”

We had a car like that and they stopped making it?  It was the  same with the electric car in this country — GM not only stopped making it, they recalled and crushed all the electric cars that were being driven.

Some day, I will understand the idiocy of people, but not any time soon.   I hope that if one of these cars honestly wins this contest they mass produce it, sell it,  and let people actually drive it.   History doesn’t give us much hope this will happen.

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