Boyz Under The Hood

The Bad News Bears story of the EVX team starts with their unlikely mentor, Hauger. With his salt-and-pepper hair and stained shorts and sandals, he has scruffy good looks of a California lifeguard. Wright joking calls him "our Baywatch administrator." But, as they all know and respect, his street-cred runs deep.

Hauger grew up as one of the only white kids in West Philly, after his divorced hippie dad moved him and his younger brother there in the early 1970s. He was raised just a few blocks from West Philly High and became street savvy and scrappy. But when the time came for high school, his father moved the family to another neighborhood to avoid having to send him there. Hauger couldn't stay away for long. After graduating with an engineering degree from Drexel University, he got assigned to teach math and science at West Philly High School. He returned to find the neighborhood in worse shape than ever. Crack vials littered the streets. Metal detectors stood at the entrance of the school. A kid got shot in a classroom down the hall. "I was scared to death," he recalls.

It got worse when Hauger was transferred to the West Philadelphia High School Academy for Automotive and Mechanical Engineering next door. Since Auto, as its nicknamed, launched in 1992, it had become a dumping ground for the worst of the worst students from the main building. Hauger didn't know much about cars, beyond fixing up his junky Fiat . The kids tested him off the bat, telling him to fuck off and threatening to kick his ass. Hauger quickly found respect by both standing up to them, and, more importantly, showing them he cared. "The teachers in the main building didn't care about us," says Wright, "but Hauger did."

Hauger quickly realized that the Auto school, in fact, was housing of some of the smartest kids around. The Auto shop also had a woolly former Air Force mechanic turned car geek nicknamed the Professor, and a philosophy-quoting body shop genius. Inspired by what he found Hauger began trying to turn Auto around. When a go-kart was donated to the school, Hauger decided to start an after-school science group that would work on building electric motor for the kart. He called it the Electric Vehicle Club. One by one, kids trickled in after school — gang members, drug dealers. One kid had a 150 IQ, but a mom on crack and a dad dying of AIDS. The kid was bouncing between foster homes, and stealing credit cards on the side. But when Hauger slapped a wrench in the kid's hand, he transformed. "When he would work on project, he would block out all the crap in his life," Hauger recalls, "and he became a mad scientist. Working on this made all the math and science hands on."

West Philly High School, which had never placed in the city science fair before, took second out of 600 projects with its electric go-kart. "As a teacher, it motivated me that this kind of incredible success was possible," Hauger says, "and it motivated the kids. For the first time, this school had a success."

As word of Hauger's club spread, kids got turned on not only by getting under the hood, but by making cars that can better the planet — and busting labels along the way. "There's a stereotype that urban kids are just violent and don't care about anything," says Wright, "but we know the environment is important, and we can do something about it."

For the EV club's next project, they modified a silver Jeep Wrangler to go electric. Clueless how to proceed, they hit the Net — downloading instructions from an obscure eco-geek magazine called Mother Earth. With Hauger guiding them and improvising plenty, they ripped out the gas engine and stored 217 lead acid batteries in a custom aluminum casing. When they drove their electric hot rod Jeep into the city's science fair of microscopes and Bunsen burners, jaws dropped. "The judges didn't know what to do with it," Hauger recalls. Then they gave West Philly High the top prize.

Despite their new achievements, old prejudices remained. Now representing the city of Philadelphia, the EV team drove their electric Jeep to the state science fair where they were the only all-black team out of 15 entrants. The judge only spoke with the kids for a few minutes, before ranking the kids in fifth place. When Hauger approached the judge after the show, she told him "it's obvious the kids didn't do the project."

Hauger was floored. They'd spent months on the thing. If the judges thought they cheated, then why did they rank them fifth instead of fifteenth — or not at all? He demanded to see the top judge, and urged the judge to go question the kids himself. "It's too late," the judge replied, "sometimes people get tough breaks."

"You motherfucker," Hauger snapped, "you don't understand the first thing about tough breaks." Hauger broke the news to the kids, who were devastated. "They had worked so hard, they didn't take it well at all," he now recalls. After spending countless after school days with the ID thief on his team, the kid repaid Hauger by stealing his credit card one day and downloading porn on his tab. Hauger was crushed. "I felt in some ways I had failed them," he says, "and I was totally unprepared for that."

The EVX team came back stronger than ever. They created a hybrid electric Saturn, which won best project at the Philadelphia Science Fair, and modified the Jeep with a hybrid electric and propane motor — taking a top prize at the Tour de Sol, and making history as the competition's first all-black entrants. Using a Boeing wind tunnel, they improved the aerodynamics of the electric Saturn, clocking colleges and corporations to win first place overall in the Tour de Sol of 2002, being awarded both the Greenest Light Duty Vehicle and Most Efficient Light Duty Vehicle.

Dr. Robert Wills, founder of the Tour De Sol competition, credits the EVX team with being more than a heartwarming story. "They have good engineering and workmanship," he says, "they also never give up. They have an incredibly positive attitude."