Summary: An interactive event with the audience designed to educate on how various kinds of drivetrains work, the advantages and disadvantages of each, electric power generation technology, batteries, aerodynamics, and what the future may bring.

        Below is an example of a general talk layout. The below version is aimed at elementary and middle school-aged children; in practice, the actual talk will be adjusted to the knowledge and maturity levels of the audience.

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        (If accessible, Aptera electric car pulls up in front of the crowd. Elaine steps out of the driver's seat with a cord, plugs it into the car, and into the wall (if socket is available). Karen steps out of the passenger's seat holding an amazon parrot in a leashed harness (if bird allowed). Karen picks up the microphone (if present):

        Karen: "Hello everyone! How are we doing today?" (crowd response) "Woo! I'm Karen, this is Elaine, and this..." (holds up bird) "... is Malcolm, but we call him Mal. He's an amazon parrot whose great grandparents came from western Mexico. Can you say 'Hi' to Mal?"

(crowd response)

        Karen: "All right!" (hands Mal to Elaine) "Mal is accompanying us on a trip across the country in our new car..." (brief description of neat places we've gone so far, records we've set, etc, and where we're going). "However, this is not just any trip, and -- as you can tell..." (if car not present, holds up poster) "... it's not just any car! Can anyone tell me what's different about this car from the one that your parents have?"

(Elaine brings the microphone (if present) up to random students for crowd interaction; the following points will be raised if the audience fails to mention them. From here on, Elaine is assumed to be working the audience while Karen answers questions)

        1) Curvy/looks like a spaceship: "That's right! This car is very aerodynamic; the air just passes right by it as you drive. Most of the energy that your engine makes gets wasted dragging air behind it. But as you can see... " (moves hand across the curves) "... there's nothing for the air to get hung up on -- not even the tires! Have you ever run while holding something that catches the wind -- a bag, a parachute, a kite, or something like that? You can feel it tugging at you, right? That's because you're making all that air in its way have to start moving; the air in the front gets all packed up tight..." (gestures with hands) "... that's high pressure -- while the air in back has to rush in to fill the empty space..." (gestures with hands) "... that's low pressure, also called a 'partial vacuum'. But with a slow slope in the back, the air "sticks" to the car as it flows, so the car doesn't drag much of a vacuum. And just to fill in what little vacuum it does create, the air from inside the car gets blown out back though vents beside the license plate. Clever, no?"

        2) Solar panel: "Very good! Now, do you think that having this solar panel makes it a solar powered car?" (audience response) "Well, unfortunately, while the sun is constantly shining on the earth many thousands of times more energy than we humans use, it's spread out across the whole planet." (gestures with arms) "So, a panel this big only makes enough power to help keep the car cool. The nice thing about that, though, is you can park the car in the sun, and when you come back to it, it's not hot inside! You *can* make car powered entirely by the sun, but they're not very comfortable -- you have to lay down, there's no cooling, they're not very safe, they're often slow, and so on. It's hard to get enough power from the sun in such a small amount of area to run a normal car.

        3) Electric: "That's right! This is an electric car. Now, most of your parents drive cars run on gasoline. A few may drive cars powered by diesel, and some of you may have some ethanol in your fuel, but I bet not many of them drive electric cars, right?" (audience response, plus interaction if any of them do have an EV) "Now, how does that gasoline get to your car?"

(crowd interaction; designed to elicit understanding of the process of oil drilling, shipping, refining, and distribution)

        "Right! And what about ethanol?"

(crowd interaction; designed to elicit understanding of the process of growing various ethanol crops, milling, fermenting, and distribution)

        "So, whatever fuel you use, you put it in your car. Then you start the car up... " (pantomimes) "... and start driving." (makes sounds and more pantomime) "But what's going on in the engine?"

(crowd interaction)

        "That's right -- it's burning the fuel. A piston in the engine presses down, down, squishing the air and fuel in a cylinder really tight. If it's a diesel engine, the fuel under that high pressure starts burning as soon as they inject it, but in a gasoline engine, you give it a little spark, and *bang!" (gestures) "The pressure shoots the piston up. Then, Bang! Bang! Bang! Other cylinders fire, and all this up and down motion keeps the crankshaft rotating and makes your car move. But there's a couple problems with this, unfortunately. For one, only about twenty percent of the energy in the fuel ends up going to work turning the wheels. The rest is wasted as heat, which is why your car needs a big radiator in its engine. For another, who here would want to breathe straight from a tailpipe?" (audience response) "Yeah, the stuff in there isn't very good."

        "Not everything in the exhaust is bad, of course. Gasoline and diesel are called "hydrocarbons", because they're made of two different types of atoms -- hydrogen, which is a little tiny one that makes up most of the universe, and carbon, which is one of the main building blocks of life. When they burn with oxygen from the air, you get H2O -- water -- from the hydrogen, and CO2 -- carbon dioxide -- from the carbon. The water is pretty harmless, and people used to think that about the carbon dioxide. Now, however, a lot of scientists are concerned that the rapid rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere -- there's more than at any point in the last 650,000 years -- may be heating up the planet, especially up north in the Arctic. Higher carbon dioxide levels are also making the oceans more acidic, which is raising a lot of concerns about all of the animals with hard, chalky shells that can be dissolved by acid. And besides that, unfortunately, burning the fuel never goes perfectly. Sometimes a little nitrogen from the air interacts and you get nitrous oxide, which makes up that brown smog haze you see over polluted cities. Sometimes you create ozone, which is great stuff when it's high in the atmosphere, but it makes it hard to breathe when it's at the surface. There's usually a little sulfur in the fuel, and that makes sulphur dioxide, which smells like rotten eggs and makes acid rain. If the fuel doesn't burn all the way through, you get carbon monoxide, which is an odorless poison. Diesel engines can create soot, known as "particulate matter", when they run. And, of course, the fuel itself isn't good for you, and you often get what are called "volatile organic compounds" in the air -- for the most part, that's fuel that's evaporated."

        "Can anyone name any other problems with gasoline?"

(audience interaction, designed to elicit "price")

        "That's right! It's really expensive. It's not easy drilling mile deep holes and shipping what comes out all over the world, running it through huge refineries, and all that, is it? Especially since the easier stuff to get out is harder and harder to come by these days. So, all of these concerns helped convince engineers to have another go at electric cars. Tell me, when do you think the first electric car was invented -- raise your hand if you think it was invented before the year 2000? Okay, lower them if you think it was before 1990. 1980? 1960? 1920? 1880? 1840? The correct answer is some time between 1832 and 1839. That long ago! In fact, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the largest carmaker in the US built only electric cars. In the early 1900s, electric cars ran neck and neck with gasoline cars, but there was a problem: the technology for gasoline engines kept advancing, but batteries didn't. Soon gasoline engines were going further and faster than electric cars, and nobody would buy them. They slowly faded into obscurity. But a lot has changed since then! The rate of major advancements in gasoline engines has been slowing down, but nanotechnology and big investments for batteries for everything from laptops to cell phones has advanced battery technology by leaps and bounds. 15 years ago, cell phones were the size of bricks, and felt like they weighed about the same, too! Today they're tiny enough to fit in the palm of your hand, and a lot of that improvement is thanks to the batteries. Does anyone know what type of battery they now use in laptops and cell phones?

(audience interaction, designed to elicit "lithium-ion", if any of them know the term)

        "Yes, lithium-ion. Well, there's a couple special types of lithium-ion batteries out there that don't hold quite as much energy in as tiny of space as a cell phone or laptop battery, but they'll last for a decade or two, pack enough power to run a house and have plenty leftover to spare, are fire resistant, hard to break, and are all around pretty impressive devices. And that's what runs this car -- the Aptera. You hook it into the wall whenever you get home and it charges up. The next time you hop in, it's completely full, and ready to take you 120 miles. It's quick, too -- really bolts away when you step on that accelerator! Even better, there's almost nothing to break; there's no valves, seals, radiator, transmission... there's not even any oil to change. Now, this one is just a small car, with only 2 1/2 seats, but electric vehicles come in all sizes; there are even electric big rigs out there! Of course, not everything is perfect with electric vehicles yet. Who here can name a few problems?"

(audience interaction designed to elicit the following)

        1) Range: "Electric vehicles used to only go 40 to 100 miles per charge. However, this one goes 120, and some more expensive ones go 250 miles or so. Since a safe driver is supposed to stop for a break at least once every two hours, and since you start with a full charge every day, it shouldn't really be seen as a requirement to go further, but you know some people don't like to take breaks when driving. I bet a couple of your parents are like that, huh? Thankfully, upcoming batteries that are being tested in the lab right now have two, three, even more times the energy density of these ones, so cheap electric vehicles with range like gasoline vehicles may actually start coming out in the next ten years. Only time will tell on that one."

        2) Charge time: "That's right -- a regular wall socket doesn't provide very much power. There's not even enough power to run a washing machine from a regular socket, let alone quickly charge an electric car. A car like this, if fully drained, would take about 8 hours to recharge. Some special outlets provide more power -- for example, the 50A outlets at RV parks can charge this Aptera to full in an hour or two. But to go faster than that, you need special "fast charging stations". The island of Oahu in Hawaii has stations that could charge this car in 15 minutes, but you know, we're not in Oahu right now! So until more people start using electric cars so that more fast charging stations get installed, we're stuck with the slower charging times. One way to work around range and charging times for now is being taken by some companies, where you take out some of the batteries and put a small generator in their place. For short trips, you run entirely on electricity, but when you run out of power, the generator starts up, running on gasoline, and bam -- your car suddenly acts like a hybrid instead of an electric car! So, 90% of your trips are electric only, but you run on gasoline for that other 10%."

        3) Price: "Yes, right now, these good batteries are fairly expensive. Thankfully, they're falling very quickly, and at this rate, they should be half as expensive in a few years. However, for now, people who buy an electric car have to expect to pay more for a car of the same size. This, however, is offset by the fact that electricity is so much cheaper than gasoline for the amount of energy you get out of it. So, in the short term, you spend more, but in the long term, you save. In a car like this, you'll actually spend more on tires than you will on electricity."

        4) Power: "Where the power comes from is a great question. Right now, there is enough power production capability out there for almost all cars in the US to switch over to electricity. This is because most charging would happen at night, when power companies have lots of extra to sell. However, much of our power comes from a very dirty fuel -- coal. Coal burns even dirtier than oil So, wouldn't that just mean making more coal pollution instead of oil pollution? Well, there's one nice thing that happens here: huge generators are much more efficient than little engines in cars, so they have to burn a lot less fuel to produce the same amount of power. So, according to scientists, carbon dioxide and most pollutant levels go down as people switch to electricity. The only pollutant that you'd get more of is particulate matter -- soot. Also, emitting pollutants at the top of a smokestack means less people breathe them than if you emit them at a tailpipe. And, lastly, it's a lot easier to clean up a couple hundred power plants than a couple hundred million cars!"

        "Speaking of clean power... how many of you would like to see the US generate more clean electricity?" (show of hands) "Who can name some types of clean electricity?"

(audience interaction)

        1) Wind: "Wind, that's a great one. In parts of the country, wind power is already as cheap as coal. It has one big disadvantage, and that's the fact that the amount of power it produces goes up and down a lot; it's not reliable. But one neat thing about electric cars is that if you build a "smart grid" that tells cars whether there's a shortage or surplus of electric power, they can change how fast they charge. Even the batteries in fast charging stations can do the same thing. Also, some people are looking to do "high altitude wind", where they fly giant kites high up into the jet stream where the wind blows constantly."

        2) Solar: "Solar power is currently very expensive, but its price is falling very fast. Some new 'solar thermal' plants are being built -- that means they use the sun to boil water and use that steam to generate electricity -- that may make electricity that's as cheap as that from coal. And in five years or so, solar panels may be as cheap or even cheaper than coal, thanks to new 'thin film' technologies. Like wind, solar power fluctuates up and down depending on whether the sun is out, so it benefits a lot from having electric vehicles out there that can change how fast they charge."

        3) Geothermal: "There's thousands of times more potential for generating power with geothermal energy than all of the electricity we consume. In the past, to make a geothermal power plant, you had to find a place where there already was hot steam, but a new technology called 'EGS', where they drill many miles underground and inject water into the hot rock, lets us make it almost anywhere. The Rockies are an especially rich source of geothermal heat."

        4) Others -- tidal, wave, biomass, etc -- general statements on each that the audience brings up.

        "Now, an electric car isn't the only thing you can run with clean power -- there's also hydrogen cars, compressed air cars, and others. However, electric cars are by far the most efficient, they're here today, and they're affordable. And that's why Elaine, Mal, and I are able to travel across country in this one!"

(Open things up for questions, letting people see the car, letting people see the bird, etc)