McCain Proposes a $300 Million Prize for a Next-Generation Car Battery - NYTimes.com

This seems like the Wrong Way To Do This. Prizes do encourage research, but wouldn’t it be better to pour this money into the NSF to encourage a much broader research program? No company or lab can really get work done all based on the hope that they’re going to get there first.

The obvious exception is the DARPA Grand Challenge. I don’t know why schools work on that. I guess they get lots of corporate sponsorship money? But how do they fund their grad students that work on it?