The star of the 2006 Philadelphia auto show was an impressively stylized sportscar that goes zero to sixty in four seconds.

Boring, I know.

Oh, and it runs entirely on soybean oil. At fifty miles to the gallon.

Concept car, five to seven years from production? nope. Six-figure pricetag? nope.

Here comes the best part.

It was designed and built in a high school garage, by five dropouts or near-dropouts, one of whom is named “Cheeseborough.” They used primarily spare parts and a high school shop teacher’s know-how.

And you can’t fool these kids as to the uniqueness of their accomplishment, either:

“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.”

So what now, GMFordToyotaDaimler? Fuck around with half-hearted hybrids and promises of hydrogen highways in two decades, or run off of something we’re paying farmers /not/ to produce, today? How soon before a team of VCs picks up these designs and starts up real competition, something you haven’t faced in a quarter-century?

Clock’s running. Get to it.

Related Posts:

• Bifröst (May, 2009)
• William Kankwamba, Malawi Maker (July, 2007)
• IBM: Genes Off-Limits (October, 2005)
• Barbarians at the Helm (July, 2006)
• Productivity and Wealth (October, 2005)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 1st, 2006 at 12:50 am and is filed under fuck you big oil, profit, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.