Overview

Charging Ahead is a classic tale of perseverance against daunting odds in the pursuit of a personal dream--and an environmental revolution. You'd have to be a fool to market a consumer electric car, let alone challenge the big three auto makers with a little start up company. But MIT graduate James Worden, with his girlfriend and a handful of audacious engineers, did both and he's well on his way to success. In this marvelous narrative, business writer Joe Sherman vividly describes how Worden and his team built the world's most advanced EV (electric vehicle), the Sunrise. Combining insightful biography with the best of science and business writing, Sherman captures not only Worden's own gripping story, but also the technical challenge of designing an electric car in an age of anxiety over the environment. He depicts Worden's fascination with EVs from childhood (he built his award winning first electric car in high school), tracing it through his monomaniacal career at MIT, where he organized a student team that built EVs for races worldwide, to the founding of Solectria, a company committed to building a consumer electric car. Sherman shows how, despite all the obstacles, Solectria eventually lined up such strategic partners as the Pentagon on its way to producing the Sunrise a lightweight, all-composite, high tech commuter car. The Sunrise would triumph over rivals from the Big Three in the 7th American Tour de Sol, and later travel from Boston to New York on a single battery charge. Charging Ahead is an engaging story of James Worden's struggle to succeed with idealism, energy, and technological superiority against seemingly impossible odds.

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9780195094794

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Reviews

"""An exciting and important book about technology, environment and corporate politics.""--Publishers Weekly ""A fitfully interesting case study of the collision of alternative technology, big business, and government.""--Kirkus Reviews ""Business is business, and the people in the car business will tell you that electric cars don't sell. Sherman chronicles the Solectria Corporation's efforts to develop and market such a car.... The story is a roller coaster of triumphs and setbacks...this interesting account should be strongly considered for public libraries as well as research collections.""--Library Journal ""Charging Ahead is mandatory reading for environmentalists and anyone concerned about the effects of out modern mobile lifestyle on the planet's atmosphere.""--Mark Pendergrast,Philadelphia Inquirer"

A fitfully interesting case study of the collision of alternative technology, big business, and government. Automotive business writer Sherman (In The Rings of Saturn, 1993) here turns to the inspiring example of a young man named James Worden, an engineering graduate of MIT, who had for years been obsessed by the thought of building an energy-efficient, safe, and affordable electric car. Armed with moral support and sweat equity from college friends who shared his vision, he founded a company called Solectria, which made several commercial automobiles, including the whimsically named Force and the user-friendly Sunrise. When the Big Three automakers found out about Worden's work, Sherman alleges, they set to work trying to get a comer on alternative-energy legislation (their efforts to bring an electric car to market have been extensively reported on by Michael Shnayerson and others). These companies effectively edged out Worden, who survived in the market only because, in the wake of the Gulf War, the Pentagon decided to examine the prospects of building energy-efficient electric vehicles to serve under battlefield conditions. Regrettably, Sherman has trouble separating the meat of his story from incidental details, and especially from unrevealing, often irrelevant excursions in automotive history. The resulting narrative is patchy at best, plodding at worst - a misfortune, given the intrinsic merits of the story. For Worden's vision remains attractive; who could resist, after all, the promise of a vehicle in which, instead of hundreds of precision-engineered moving pans operating at high temperature, there were a motor with one moving part and a controller with no moving parts ? In the hands of a Tracy Kidder, this story might have become a model of literary journalism. In Sherman's hands, it fails to move. (Kirkus Reviews)

The section of the book dealing with Solectrica is interesting and readable The journal of Energy Literature V. 1 1999

An exciting and important book about technology, environment and corporate politics. --Publishers Weekly A fitfully interesting case study of the collision of alternative technology, big business, and government. --Kirkus Reviews Business is business, and the people in the car business will tell you that electric cars don't sell. Sherman chronicles the Solectria Corporation's efforts to develop and market such a car.... The story is a roller coaster of triumphs and setbacks...this interesting account should be strongly considered for public libraries as well as research collections. --Library Journal Charging Ahead is mandatory reading for environmentalists and anyone concerned about the effects of out modern mobile lifestyle on the planet's atmosphere. --Mark Pendergrast,Philadelphia Inquirer

Author Information

Joe Sherman is the author of In the Rings of Saturn(OUP). A freelance journalist, he lives in Vermont.

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