Soybean-Powered Car Gets 50 mpg, Made by High School Kids
cn | 07 March, 2006 19:00So on cbsnews.com the other day they ran a story about a handful of city high school kids who build a soybean-powered car that goes from 0-60 in 4 seconds, gets 50 miles per gallon, and maybe even saved their lives. From cbsnews.com:
The star at last week's Philadelphia Auto Show wasn't a sports car or an economy car. It was a sports-economy car — one that combines performance and practicality under one hood.
...
A car that can go from zero to 60 in four seconds and get more than 50 miles to the gallon would be enough to pique any driver's interest. So who do we have to thank for it. Ford? GM? Toyota? No — just Victor, David, Cheeseborough, Bruce, and Kosi, five kids from the auto shop program at West Philadelphia High School
The five kids, along with a handful of schoolmates, built the soybean-fueled car as an after-school project. It took them more than a year — rummaging for parts, configuring wires and learning as they went. As teacher Simon Hauger notes, these kids weren't exactly the cream of the academic crop.
"We have a number of high school dropouts," he says. "We have a number that have been removed for disciplinary reasons and they end up with us."
One of the Fab Five, Kosi Harmon, was in a gang at his old school — and he was a terrible student. The car project has changed all that.
"I was just getting by with the skin of my teeth, C's and D's," he says. "I came here, and now I'm a straight-A student."
What's the best part of this whole situation? These kids know more about just making cool cars. Why wouldn't a big car maker jump on this? The kids have the answer:
"We made this work," says Hauger. "We're not geniuses. So why aren't they doing it?"
Kosi thinks he knows why. The answer, he says, is the big oil companies.
"They're making billions upon billions of dollars," he says. "And when this car sells, that'll go down — to low billions upon billions."
Posted in
Computers/Technology, Inventions, Science .
Comment: (0).
Trackbacks:(0).
Permalink
«Next post |
Previous post»