Download Ingenious: A True Story of Invention, Automotive Daring, and the Race to Revive America AudioBook Free
In 2007, the X Reward Foundation declared that it would give $10 million to anyone who could create a safe, mass-producible car that can travel a hundred miles on the vitality equivalent of a gallon of gas. The challenge attracted several hundred groups from all around the globe, including a large number of amateurs. Many designed their autos entirely from scrape, rejecting generations of thinking about just what a car should look like. Jason Fagone follows four of those groups from the build level to the final contest and beyond - into a global in which destiny hangs on a minimal pull coefficient and a lug nut can be considered a beautiful talisman. The result is a gripping history of crazy cooperation, absurd hazards, colossal expectations, and poignant losses. Within an old pole barn in central Illinois, childhood sweethearts hack mutually an electric-powered dreamboat, using scavenged parts, forging their own steel, and burning up through their life personal savings. In Virginia, an impassioned entrepreneur and his hand-picked squad of speed freaks pool their imaginations and create a car so light that you can press it across the floor with your thumb. In Western world Philly, a group of disaffected high school students enter into their own as they build a cross types car with the engine unit of an Harley street bike. And in Southern California, the early favorite - a start-up guaranteed by a huge number in endeavor capital-designs a car that looks like an alien egg. Ingenious is a joyride. Fagone needs us into the garages and the thoughts of the inventors, taking the fractious yet beautiful procedure for engineering a unique machine. Suspenseful and bighearted, this is actually the story of regular people risking failing, economic ruin, and ridicule to generate something vital that Detroit experienced never pulled off. As the Illinois team wrote in chalk on the wall membrane of these barn, "SOMEBODY MUST DO SOMETHING. THAT Someone IS US."
