Photo from xprize.org.

Earlier this week, Nick Bunkley of the New York Times reported that the X Prize Foundation is sponsoring a competition with an expected prize of $10 million to produce a car that travels 100 miles on a single gallon of gas. The purpose of the prize is to stimulate innovation and ultimately boost the average fuel economy of vehicles which has topped out at around 20 miles a gallon. Damox’s Car Blog notes that there is one important catch: “the car must be commercially viable. That means no complicated materials that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and none of those silly one-person pod cars that are unsafe and undesirable.”