From the folks who brought you the madcap alt-fuel "Escape From Berkeley" race to Vegas comes a Progressive Automotive X-Prize contender with a twist — a 1980 diesel Volkswagen Rabbit pickup converted to to run on discarded X-Prize promotional materials.
In an alt-fuel paraphrase of Marshall McLuhan, the fuel source is the contest. How meta.
Jess Hobbs of The Shipyard told Wired.com the gasification gurus there are "really serious" about the entry, though the X-Prize honchos have yet to officially accept it. Gasification uses heat to create synthetic flammable fuel out of carbonaceous solids, and The Shipyard crew believes its pickup — similar to the one pictured above — will get the equivalent of 100 mpg burning things like leftover copies of the 68-page X-Prize competition guidelines.
"The whole idea is we want to show that there’s more fuel out there than what people consider to be fuel," Hobbs said.
The Shipyard is calling the car 88MPH in recognition of a purported top speed death-defyingly fast for a Rabbit.
Gasification technology has long been an obsession for the folks at The Shipyard. They've installed a gasifier in a 1989 Honda Accord (shown below) and sold DIY kits that look something like a still you'd find in the woods somewhere.
"A gasifier in your sedan trunk doesn't really pass the 'your solution needs to be realistic' threshold required for X Prize entry," said Jim Mason, the self-described Shipyard "mega-muffin grand poobah." He hopes the first prototype will be a "magic box" that fits in the back of a truck like a toolbox and is no harder than a pellet stove to operate.
"If we're going to create something that's actually going to be of service for the future, we really should be adapting current cars on the market," Hobbs said.
The choice of a VW truck allows for a pre-built gasifier to be mounted in the pickup bed — a solution that Hobbs says is as seamless and unobtrusive as mounting batteries in the trunk of a Prius. "This prototype is trying to adapt something that's very modular," she told Wired.com. "What's in the Honda isn't as modular as we want it."
The gasified Vee Dub is still in the concept stage at this point, but we're hoping it'll make an appearance at The Shipyard's second Escape from Berkeley in June, which will lead entrants on a wild run to Mexico.
Top photo: Flickr/DigitalK. Bottom photo: The Shipyard. Used with permission.
See Also:
- Automotive X-Prize Draws 25 Teams So Far
- Veggie-Oil Lotus Wins Alt-Fuel Race to Vegas
- Mad Max Meets Cannonball Run in Alt-Fuel Race to Vegas
