Super-cars

Alan Boyle writes: The $10 million Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize competition finished up its final on-track round, and the results are pretty clear: If anyone is going to win the $5 million contest for four-seat cars, it’s going to be the folks on the Virginia-based Edison2 team. If anyone is going to win the $2.5 million contest for alternative two-seat tandem experimental vehicles, it’s going to be the Swiss X-Tracer team. And the last $2.5 million – set aside for two-seat, side-by-side vehicles – is up for grabs.

Edison2 and X-Tracer are sure things, because those teams have the only cars still standing in each of those contests … two in each category. The side-by-side contest has five cars entered, and based on a runoff race that was conducted this morning, it looks as if it’s down to the Finnish RaceAbout team vs. the Wave II from Nevada-based Li-Ion Motors. Those teams finished the course at the Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn, Mich., just seconds apart, with RaceAbout leading by a nose.

The final results aren’t exactly “final” yet: Performance data will be used to adjust the times for the runoff, and all of the nine cars still left standing have to go through laboratory tests at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois next month. Those lab tests will verify that the winning cars really can get the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon of gasoline, or MPGe. That’s the main point of the X Prize competition: to promote the development of cars that are ultra-efficient as well as safe and salable.

But based on today’s results, there will be a winner. Or, in this case, winners.