The X Prize Foundation, which organized the highly successful $10 million Ansari X PRIZE competition that was eventually won by Burt Rutan and SpaceShipOne, just announced the creation of a new X Prize to inspire entrepreneurial innovation in the automotive industry. Although the details are still being firmed up, it looks like the prize will encourage cutting-edge research into automobile fuel efficiency. Not sure if the new prize will require alternative fuel sources or traditional fuel sources (i.e. gas from the local filling station), but the premise sounds interesting enough. Mark Goodstein, the recently appointed executive director for the new X Prize, explains what the new award is all about:

“The X PRIZE is about changing paradigms. The current paradigm is that it’s perfectly acceptable to drive a car that only gets 20 or 30 miles per gallon. This prize is about leveraging cash and opportunity to effect positive change in the environment, economy and geopolitics.”

Anyway, you may recognize the name Mark Goodstein - he was the founder of GoTo.com as well as the founder of X1 Technologies (no relation to the X Prize). With a successful serial entrepreneur at the helm, the new X Prize competition should get off to a running start. John Neff of Autoblog suggests that the cash prize will finally spur some real breakthrough innovation in Detroit:

“As fun as the X-Cup race to outer space was, a major breakthrough in fuel efficiency for automobiles would be a much more useful achievement than being able to cart fat cats with deep pockets into lower orbit. No official word yet on the contest’s rules or what the prize will be, though we suspect it will likely be in the many millions.

Since it seems that the auto industry moves only by the hand of market pressure, here’s hoping that a large quantity of cash will motivate all those amateur engineers out there to save us from oblivion. You can bet that Autoblog will be sponsoring Eric Bryant, our own resident engineer, who can build a vehicle out of a garbage can, a roll of duct tape and a wire hanger that runs on Boo-Berry Kool-Aid and gets 168 mpg.”

Tags: XPrize fuel automobile