www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/17/eveningnews/main1329941.shtml
You Pick The Story Steve Hartman's Assignment America series will return Friday, March 3, with a new story and another chance for you to vote on his next assignment for the CBS Evening News with Bob Schieffer.
"If you give kids that have been stereotyped as not being able to do anything an opportunity to do something great, they'll step up." Simon Hauger, teacher at West Philadelphia High School (CBS) The star at last week's Philadelphia Auto Show wasn't a sports car or an economy car. It was a sports-economy car one that combines performance and practicality under one hood. But as CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman reports in this week's Assignment America, the car that buyers have been waiting decades comes from an unexpected source and runs on soybean bio-diesel fuel to boot. A car that can go from zero to 60 in four seconds and get more than 50 miles to the gallon would be enough to pique any driver's interest. No just Victor, David, Cheeseborough, Bruce, and Kosi, five kids from the auto shop program at West Philadelphia High School The five kids, along with a handful of schoolmates, built the soybean-fueled car as an after-school project. It took them more than a year rummaging for parts, configuring wires and learning as they went. As teacher Simon Hauger notes, these kids weren't exactly the cream of the academic crop. "We have a number that have been removed for disciplinary reasons and they end up with us." One of the Fab Five, Kosi Harmon, was in a gang at his old school and he was a terrible student. "I was just getting by with the skin of my teeth, C's and D's," he says. To Hauger, the soybean-powered car shows what kids any kids can do when they get the chance. "If you give kids that have been stereotyped as not being able to do anything an opportunity to do something great, they'll step up," he says. Stepping up is something the big automakers have yet to do. They're still in the early stages of marketing hybrid cars while playing catch-up to the Bad News Bears of auto shop. "They're making billions upon billions of dollars," he says. "And when this car sells, that'll go down to low billions upon billions."
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