Ingenious

"An epic tale of invention, in which ordinary people's lives are changed forever by a quest that combines elements of the Olympics, NASCAR, Junkyard Wars, the Longitude Prize of 1714, and the Apollo program In 2006, science-fiction enthusiast Peter Diamandis announced he would give $10 million to anyone who could build a safe, mass-producible car that traveled 100 miles on the energy equivalent of a gallon of gas. Anyone. The challenge attracted more than 300 teams from all over the world, including dozens of amateurs. Many designed their cars entirely from scratch, rejecting decades of thinking about what a car should look like. This book follows four teams from the build stage to the final race and beyond. One team hacked together an electric-powered dreamboat in an old pole barn in central Illinois. A team based in Virginia built a car so light that you could push it across the floor with your thumb. A third team was a Southern California start-up with a car that looked like an alien egg. A fourth was an inner-city high school. Fagone takes the reader into the garages and the minds of the inventors, capturing their passions, and traces the development of the cars in prose that renders automotive engineering romantic and vivid even to nongeeks. Written with propulsive energy and emotion, this is the bighearted story of ordinary people risking failure, economic ruin, and ridicule to create something Detroit had said was impossible. As the Illinois team wrote in chalk on the wall of their barn, "SOMEONE HAS TO DO SOMETHING, AND THAT SOMEONE IS US.""--

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.