Automotive X Prize Winner, Edison2

This week I had an unusual opportunity very close to home. We are all familiar with events that are over hyped, but how often do you get to do something where you have no expectations at all, and it winds up being a big deal? That kind of thing almost never happens.

You’ve heard of the X Prizes. There are several of them, and they are meant to inspire people or organizations to achieve a specific goal that might not be achieved otherwise. They usually involve some very lofty goal, such as putting private manned craft into space, or creating a vehicle that  gets 100 mpg. The competitions involve multi-million dollar prizes. Other X Prizes that have yet to be claimed include genome sequencing, an unmanned lunar rover, and of course the Tricorder X Prize for a medical diagnostic device (like the Star Trek tricorder), you know, in case you’re looking for something to do.

Just to give you an idea of the scope of the X Prize competitions, Burt Rutan was involved in winning the first X Prize awarded – $10 million for the space flight Ansari X Prize in 2004. This project sent two civilians into space on two occasions within two weeks of one another. Sending private astronauts into space is a bit of a big deal. Doing it on a private budget is an even bigger deal.

The automotive X Prize (sponsored by Progressive Insurance) was won by a company called Edison2. They are located in Lynchburg, Virginia of all places (yes, the home of Jerry Fallwell and Liberty University), which just happens to be about 50 miles from my house. And John Fox (VP Marketing for Velocity) set up a meeting where we both were able to get a personal tour of their facility.

Edison2 was at Solid Edge University, and I got to see the car there, but for some reason it just didn’t click. They are indeed a user of Solid Edge for their CAD. They told me that they have the entire car in Solid Edge. Most of it is done with ordered features. I believe most of the design was done before ST3 was available. I saw a couple of the guys using Solid Edge for various components or subsystems. The body shape, while I believe it could have been made in Solid Edge, was made in Alias because that’s what their people doing this work were familiar with.

I went into the meeting a bit blind. I wasn’t sure in what capacity I was being invited – as a blogger, as an independent engineer, just as a convenient way to finally meet John Fox… Their facility is in an industrial area, and I found the building easily enough, but there was no sign announcing I’d arrived. I just drove around the building until someone in an Edison2 shirt asked me what I was looking for. How lucky was that?

The offices are just set up in one big room with the shop. Its great to see stuff being made. They had 3-4 completed cars, a couple in progress, and lots of the stuff that goes along with a group of people doing actual development work – mockups, obsolete designs, material samples, fixturing, white board doodles, the X Prize trophy, and yes, printed wireframe 3D views generated in Solid Edge.

I grew up in the 1970’s, when the US was very conscious of things like energy efficiency, and alternate energy resources. People under 30 think this is all new stuff, but its not. In fact, the earliest electric cars came around the turn of the century – the turn of the last century, that is.

Anyway, I grew up wanting to become an “alternate energy engineer”. I had no idea what that meant, but I was interested in minimalist transportation, and sources of power other than gasoline. This was natural, I guess, since I wasn’t old enough to drive and I spent a lot of time on my bicycle. By the time I went to college, the interest in alternative energies had died down, and we were building bigger and bigger vehicles. America doesn’t seem to be able to get past this.

One thing I did do in college was participate in the RIT SunRayce, a solar car competition held in the ’90s (I was on the 10 year plan). I was responsible for the wheels of the vehicle (the solar car is on the right, methanol car on the left, and mini-baja front center).  Many students wanted to use motorcycle technology, but as a long time bicyclist, and having worked in bicycle shops for years, I knew we could save a lot of weight and rolling resistance, and still retain the strength we needed with spoked bicycle wheels, using 20″ BMX rims and specially designed and built hubs.

As a part of all of that, it seemed obvious to me that you could create transportation that didn’t have “parts you couldn’t lift”. That’s the reason that the big automotive companies in the US will never create cars that get more than 50 mpg – because they are unwilling to sacrifice their image of a “car” as a very heavy over engineered rolling ingot.  It was no surprise to me that the employees of Edison2 had distinctly non-American accents. The British, for example, are responsible for the Lotus (supercar performance from stock Toyota engines), Triumph, AC Cars (precursor to the Shelby Cobra, and possibly deriving from the Ferrari 375), and the old MG’s, and Austin Healeys, and the whole idea that to race, you have to build a light car. Americans solve the problem with just a bigger engine. I’m not one of those USA bashers, but I do see that there are some industries in this country which are simply too institutionalized – too stuck in a rut to have any revolutionary ideas. If you’re going to change the automotive industry, you’re going to have to do it as an outsider, a union-based shop is very unlikely to innovate anything.

This is why at the X Prize competition, you might see some vehicles that would pass for “cars” in the US, but none of them won. The vehicles that won the competition were ground-up concepts, where the idea of “car” is completely redefined based on the requirements for the race. Edison2 was able to see beyond the traditional definitions and inject enough practicality to make an actual usable vehicle that goes further on less.

Oliver Kuttner, CEO of Edison2, uses the car to commute between Lynchburg and Charlottesville, VA, about 65 miles one way. So this is a car that can actually be used in real life, although it does stand out a little in the parking lot when going to get lunch. The electricity to make his commute costs approximately $1.75 compared to the standard car commute which costs about $14. He’s got a vision for the car that would put it at less than $20k, and possibly less than $15k for basic transportation that keeps you out of the elements, passes safety tests, and gives you some degree of comfort (heat and air conditioning and an iPod dock – and no, I didn’t ask if it was also compatible with Android).

This commute cost business actually turns out to be important for the state of Virginia. One of Virginia’s largest industries is coal. If we could stop paying to import oil from people who don’t like us, and use less equivalent coal from local sources to create electricity used to drive vastly more efficient cars, this starts to look like more than just a technical solution to a high mpg competition. It could also solve political problems and drive world peace :o)

I was very excited when Oliver invited me and John Fox to ride in the car to go to lunch. I wanted to see how practical a car like this could be. Plus, following the earlier analogy, riding in the Very Light Car could be compared to taking a ride in a space ship. This was a bigger deal every time I thought about it.

Getting in was a bit of a challenge. The door has a high sill, and the car is only a 2 door. Once in, I found the back seat to be very roomy. There was certainly more leg room than in the backseat of my Subaru Outback wagon. It was a little loud, however. In the back, I was sitting right over the motor. I should say, though, that these cars are stripped of amenities such as sound deadening. They are a very believable proof-of-concept, and if you are willing to accept the spartan interior of something like a Lotus Elise, this really isn’t far from that, although the Elise is priced about $30k above the projected market price of Edison2 vehicles.

I should note here that Oliver was clear that Edison2 is not the next Tesla. The original Teslas were based on a Lotus with an electric drive train, but the Edison2 cars are a completely different platform aimed at the low end of the market rather than the high end. But you might see a theme here of British minimalist engineering and British racing heritage.

On the performance side, the Edison2 car didn’t feel sluggish. I learned how to drive on a 1979 diesel Rabbit (~50 horsepower). The Very Light Car was definitely better than that, although it uses about 20 hp during acceleration, and less than 10 hp to maintain 70 mph. Acceleration and speed on divided highway sort of driving was certainly acceptable. And this was with 3 people in the car. It is said to do 0-60 in 14.2 seconds, which is better than a lot of cars that use 3 times the amount of energy to move.

I should mention that the car I rode in was an electric vehicle, but some of the specs listed are for models with internal combustion engines. The engine used for the X Prize race was a single cylinder Yamaha 250 cc motorcycle engine that cost $650,000 to develop (from a $1000 off the shelf motor). It was turbocharged and injected, and transformed to run on ethanol. One of the movies on a link above mentions that the platform is “energy source agnostic”. This is how they power the car with the Yamaha motor, or a Smart car motor or an electric motor. The Smart car motor in a Smart car was rated for 41 mpg. When the Smart car motor was put in the VLC it got 89 mpg. So this just demonstrates that you have to rethink the entire platform to get radically better efficiency from a vehicle. You can’t just take a Chevy Cruze and put an electric motor in it.

The ride was also acceptable, although noticeably different. The vehicle weight is 830 lbs. This is going to give a vastly different ride than your typical 3000 lb car. In some ways it rode like a go-cart, with a stiff suspension, its narrower tires and very low center of gravity. Kuttner said it was tested to pull 1.18 g lateral using tires intended for a Smart car. Even performance cars are doing well at 1.1 g lateral.

The suspension is a little remarkable in itself. At Solid Edge University, I listened (with a bit of horror) to the reasoning for the weird geometry of the front end of the Local Motors Rally Fighter vehicle. You had to push the motor back and make the front very long in order to minimize scrub of the long travel suspension on the front wheels. But that’s only true if you mount the suspension transverse, like in normal cars. If you use a trailing arm, you can get much better travel, no side loading scrub at all, and can still stick the engine between the wheels. So much for design by committee. Edison2 designed a patented trailing arm linkage that makes very clever use of space and minimizes unsprung mass for a suspension that will respond more like a mountain bike than a school bus.

And after all that, it has a trunk that’s bigger than the trunk on my 350z convertible.

Is this a car that’s ready to go out and replace every Prius on the road? No, not today. This is beyond just a proof of concept, but it will require some “consumerization” compromises before it can start replacing mainstream vehicles. Edison2 has proven what you can do with only a few compromises, which are tips of the hat to practicality more than vanity. There is a lot of great engineering work in this vehicle, and I hope it finds love in the market place to validate the hard work and brains that went into it. The US might not be the right market to see something like this blossom, however, where seeing a Smart car or a Fiat 500 is still a jarring experience.