My brother, Joe Justice, is just an average Joe. He has a lovely wife, two cats, a great job doing techy stuff.
But there is another side to Joe that we, his family, knew about . . . but tried to ignore. Joe loves SPEED. In college he bought a civic, then a different civic, then a del sol, with which he did super shifty things on the way from Laramie, Wyoming, to Boulder, Colorado, for Kung Fu class. On his honeymoon, he rented high-performance cars just to see how they would handle on the winding roads of Oahu. When visiting his wife's family in Japan, he scheduled a side trip to the Honda manufacturing lines for the NSX and insight, to take pictures of suspensions, and to eat in their gourmet restaurants.
I kid you not. He loves this stuff.
So in 2006 Joe decided to build a high-performance car for under $17,000 in his garage.
Then it happened . . .
He heard about the Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE, a competition to create a 100mpg car for mass production. As he reviewed the criteria, the pieces began to fall in line.
I kid you not. He loves this stuff.
So in 2006 Joe decided to build a high-performance car for under $17,000 in his garage.
Then it happened . . .
He heard about the Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE, a competition to create a 100mpg car for mass production. As he reviewed the criteria, the pieces began to fall in line.
- His existing design met the preliminary criteria.
- His agile programing skills could be put to use here. He could evaluate and change the design at regular intervals to meet competition deadlines and performance criteria.
- With a background in lean/agile project management and modular engineering, he could split the big work into smaller tasks and have volunteers all over the country (and a few abroad) work on pieces of the big picture.
- The prize money was nothing to sneeze at.
- His family are green freaks! (His mom and step-dad raise worms, for Pete's sake!)
And so the process began, in secret, in his garage.