Perhaps the biggest winner of the Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE competition is the X PRIZE Foundation itself. The organization, formed in 1996 with the Ansari X PRIZE competition to stimulate private spaceflight, not only issued a challenge to seen if automakers could build a vehicle that could get 100 miles per gallon (or the [...]

More than two years after challenging engineers to develop a new class of vehicle that could achieve 100 miles per gallon or the energy equivalent (mpge), the X PRIZE Foundation on Thursday crowned three winners in its $10-million Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE competition. Charlottesville, Va.’s Edison2 team took home a $5 million prize for [...]

The original field of 136 experimental vehicles vying for a $10 million prize in Progressive Insurance’s Automotive X PRIZE competition has been whittled down to just nine finalists, competition organizers said Tuesday. Each of these finalists, having passed on-track testing at Michigan International Speedway, now move onto the validation phase, where the vehicles must prove [...]

Less than one month after NASA crashed its Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) into the moon’s surface in order to analyze the resulting plume of debris for signs of water, the U.S. space agency is handing out nearly $2 million on Thursday to engineers developing technology for a much softer landing on the [...]