Winner of $5 million Auto X Prize took unconventional approach

But Oliver Kuttner succeeded by using the same nitty-gritty approach that once led him to rebuild a Corvette engine in his college dorm room.

Kuttner’s team, Edison2, created the Very Light Car, which achieved a combined 102.5 miles per gallon through a series of tests at the Michigan International Speedway and Argonne National Laboratory. It was a team with extensive experience in auto racing, including at the 24 Hours of Daytona and Indianapolis 500. In fact, the other winning teams were also salted with racing veterans, and although students and idiosyncratic inventors submitted entries, it was teams backed by specialty companies or big money that took the prizes.

Kuttner, a commercial real estate developer, said he had invested millions of dollars of his own money into his entries, even filling up his wife’s credit cards. He won the competition’s top prize of $5 million in the four-seat vehicle category, a purse that was provided by the Progressive Group of Insurance Companies.

The other winners of $2.5 million each for two-seat vehicles were the Li-Ion Motors Wave II, a battery-electric vehicle, which posted the energy equivalent of 187 miles per gallon, and the enclosed battery-electric motorcycle E-Tracer from X-Tracer Team Switzerland, which achieved the equivalent of 187.6 miles per gallon.

That team was formed by Peraves, a Swiss company that sells the Monotracer, a gasoline-powered version of the E-Tracer. And although the Li-Ion team worked in a shop once used by Chip Ganassi Racing in Mooresville, N.C., the heart of NASCAR country, Li-Ion Motors Corp. of Las Vegas has been developing electric vehicles since 2000.

The winners survived multiple stages of competition that began with the X Prize Foundation’s April 2007 release of a design proposal. One hundred and eleven teams entered, but when testing started at the speedway last April, only 24 teams showed up.

Edison2 exemplified the type of innovation that the X Prize Foundation intended to foster, said Peter Diamandis, foundation chairman and chief executive.

“You get what you incentivize, and our goal was to incentivize 100 miles per gallon or the energy equivalent, or better,’’ he said. “We really are hoping to give birth to a new industry. That process is critical. That happened with the Ansari X Prize, and we really are looking to make that happen here.’’

To win the Automotive X Prize, Kuttner, 49, let his penchant for unconventionality extend to the car he created, and to Edison2, his company in Lynchburg, Va. Born in Munich in 1961, Kuttner said he came to the United States with his family in 1975. After they settled in Scarsdale, N.Y., the 14-year-old, who excelled in mathematics, wound up in the Scarsdale High School auto shop class. His first project, installing a Chevrolet V-8 engine in a Jaguar E-Type, initiated Kuttner into the unconventionality that often attends an auto project. News of the X Prize in 2007 rekindled his desire for auto adventure

While he would not say how much money the process cost, Kuttner said he spent “millions, absolutely.’’