. . . Known as the AXP, the competition will award at least $10 million to the team that builds a 100-mpg machine and then wins a race against other green vehicles. Some 43 teams are already working on their rides, even though the competition won't be formally announced until early 2008. A qualifying race in 2009 will serve as a proof-of-concept shakedown, and then, in 2010, the remaining squads will go after the big money. Smith is convinced that the plug-in hybrid electric car he's building has a shot.
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The rules, which will be finalized later this year, have three broad components: efficiency (cars must get at least 100 miles per gallon); emissions (cars must produce less than 200 grams of greenhouse gases per mile); and economic viability (mass production of the cars has to be feasible, and the company has to have a plan to make 10,000 a year). It's this last point — that a winning vehicle has to be safe, comfortable, and ready to be mass-manufactured at a reasonable cost — that will separate the fantasy-mobiles from those that could actually be put into production and sold for a profit. "We do not want toys," says S. M. Shahed, a Honeywell corporate fellow who, as a past president of the International Society of Automotive Engineers, serves as an adviser to the AXP. In other words, a one-off, carbon-fiber-ensconced motorized recumbent bicycle isn't going to cut it.
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the company has to have a plan to make 10,000 a year