When Eric Ryan is sent by Teach for America to a hard scrabble high school in the heart of North Carolina's NASCAR country, one of the many things he didn't count on was Harold Miller sticking his head into his class one morning and announcing, "Hey Mr. Ryan, we're gonna build an electric car." Two regional utilities had challenged a group of elite schools throughout the South to design and build battery-powered electric vehicles. Although Ryan's underprivileged high school had not even been on the list, somehow Miller had managed to squeak them in and onto an adventure which not only began to take over the lives of Ryan, Miller, and a local engineer named George Hawkins, but an unexpected group of kids with no visible resources, know-how, or expectations. With an ancient Ford Escort rescued from the compacter, a few hundred pounds of scavenged golf cart batteries, a local minor league NASCAR driver as coach, and the local constabulary looking the other way as the reborn "Shocker" began careening over back roads on test runs, the kids (barely) get their pasted together dark horse to the big contest in Richmond, and then, naturally, win the whole thing.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Inspiration for a country looking to "Do the right thing",
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This review is from: Electric Dreams (Paperback)
Caroline Kettlewell has captured the nature of the EV Challenge in perpetuity and written a book that shows how every one of us can make a huge difference if we just find the right inspiration.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Makes building electric vehicles exciting!,
This review is from: Electric Dreams (Paperback)
Usually when I find an excellent book and want to write a review of it, so many other people have reviewed the book and said so many positive things about it, I end up not writing a review. This little book is as good as the lone other reviewer states, and deserves to be further reviewed.
It makes the building of an electric vehicle a vital, exciting prospect. The various participants are well described and come to life, and this adds to the feeling that any of us can do this. The details of EV building are available, but are NOT overwhelming. The passions and hesitancies of the students, teachers, and community members are described, and this helps the reader to become excited about the effort of this impoverished high school team to build an EV from scratch, and enter the regional EV race put on by the local power company. Descriptions of the competition (which include examining the vehicles for including the right standards, weighing the vehicle, an oral presentation by students describing the "why" behind their choices, a 'race' of the vehicles to see which ones can utilize their electric charges the longest, and another real race for the fastest vehicle) kept me on the edge of my seat. Always with electric vehicles is the threat that the battery charge will run out, so there were many hold your breath moments to see how "our" team would do. Easy to read, this book is an excellent introduction to electric vehicles.
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