Unfolding over three years and involving 80 cars, 67 teams, millions of dollars and hundreds of maxed-out credit cards, according to “Ingenious” author Jason Fagone, the Automotive X Prize, with its $10 million lure to whatever entity was able to create a safe, practical, 100-mpg car, was supposed to change the way vehicles were built forever. Instead, it has ultimately yielded little in the way of mainstream product. But for a brief moment, the prize was a hotbed of automotive innovation.
A paean to the long-lost American art of invention, “Ingenious” is driven by characters who are, by turns, whip-smart and wide-eyed and desperate, and a plot to achieve a seemingly unobtainable goal. Fagone was less interested in what was being built than the psychology of the prize, which was “using a bald appeal to human greed to achieve an idealistic goal,” he writes.
With “Ingenious,” Fagone has penned a thought-provoking book that will appeal to automotive-efficiency geeks and readers who long for America’s can-do past.
Jason Fagone, Crown Publishing Group, 384 pages, $26
