I cannot decide whether X-prize idea is interesting or silly. On one
hand, I would love to see the CalCars initiative be awarded $10
million. On the other hand,
any automobile company could easily do what they are doing, and if
automobile companies will not take part in this R&D effort nothing
will come of it. $10 million is nothing to an auto company; the
initial $10 million down-payment is not what is stopping the
development of plug-in hybrids. Any company other than Toyota or
Honda would have to pay hundreds of millions if not billions to begin
manufacturing real hybrid cars (plug-in or gasoline only).
I think direct grants of $10 million to many researchers working on
plug-in hybrids and cold fusion would be better than a single prize.
If we insist on a prize that you get only after you succeed, cold
fusion will probably never emerge from the laboratory. It seems
unlikely to me that a single researcher will develop cold fusion into
a practical source of energy at this stage. What we need are many
different researchers each pushing the development along in different
ways. Progress, not perfection.
Incidentally, people are not buying fake hybrids. People are smarter
than automobile execs think they are. See:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/05/25/BUGK8J1JK11.DTL
Quotes:
Honda sold 2,023 Accord Hybrids in April 2005 and only 614 in April
2006, according to Rosten.
The Toyota Highlander Hybrid sport utility vehicle met a similar
fate. It gets 22 mpg on average, compared to 19 mpg for the standard
Toyota Highlander, according to Consumer Reports. Yet the sticker
price on the hybrid version is $39,895 compared with $32,465 for the
non-hybrid Highlander. . . .
- Jed
