The first place winner of arguably the most celebrated auto invention contest ever, the X Prize, doesn’t have cup holders. That’s quite a shame, considering you’ll be able to afford daily $4 Starbucks lattes when you add up the savings from driving a car that gets 111 miles per gallon. Team Edison2 from Virginia took home $5 million this morning at an awards ceremony in Washington D.C. for their Very Light Car. They’re quite literal in naming their vehicles. It weighs 840 lbs. compared to 4,000 lbs. of the average car.
“You know, it has a heater. It has some basic ventilation. It accelerates briskly enough not to hold up traffic, but it’s just a modest car,” Edison2 founder and chief executive Oliver Kuttner told NPR.
The other two winners, Switzerland‘s X-Tracer team and North Carolina‘s Li-ion Motors Corporation, took home $2.5 million each, and the LA Times reports that they’re currently taking orders from consumers. But not so fast says Consumer Reports Director of Auto Testing David Champion, “I think these cars are very much in the development stages. But they really showed the passion and the drive and the ingenuity of these engineers to produce these cars that were extremely fuel efficient.”
Guess we’ll have to wait a few more years to drive one. Maybe, by then, they’ll design them with cup holders.
Screengrab via YouTube.