Image: cityscape from Wong Kar Wai's beautiful 2046 (2004).

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

The X Prize Goes Automotive

While this is starting to get a bit far afield from my purported areas of interest for this blog, the X Prize Foundation has come up here a few times recently, so this seemed relevant to post.

The foundation recently announced a new competition geared at inspiring "a new generation of viable, super-efficient vehicles" with a prize yet to be determined but to be at least $10 million.

Fascinatingly, the foundation is looking for "host cities" for the contest, which will be the stops on "a rigorous cross country race that combines speed, distance, urban driving and overall performance." How far have we come from Cannonball Run? A car race that is, actually, sponsored by an organization with a mandate to "create radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity"?

In any event, you have to love the idea of cities filling out the RFP (no kidding, there is one) to be stops on the race... it's like a whole new era of Olympic bids, only the athletes are replaced with the cars of the future.

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