British inventors offered £10m prize to design green family car - By Severin Carrell (27 April 2003)

Britain's car makers and back-street inventors are being offered £10m in prize money in a race to design a new ultra-clean, planet-friendly car. The government-funded competition will be unveiled by the Transport Secretary, Alistair Darling, on Tuesday in the hope that it will lead to the discovery of a "green" car so cheap and popular it will rival sales of the Vauxhall Astra and Ford Fiesta.


Ministers want engineers to design the prototype for a mass-market family car that will be twice as fuel-efficient as today's average vehicle – and one that can be on the road within a few years.

The £10m in prize money will be split between a handful of winning designs over the next three years.

The competition is likely to promote research into highly advanced hydrogen fuel-cell cars, battery-powered vehicles, petrol-battery hybrids and engines that run on fuel made from straw, sugar beet and sawdust – "biomass" fuel.

It will be called the Ultra Low Carbon Car Challenge; winning vehicles must emit less than 100g of carbon dioxide per kilometre – much less than the 170g per km that the average new car releases.

The Department of Transport says its main goal is to design "an affordable ultra-low-carbon passenger car, capable of mass production within a near to medium time scale, at a competitive price".