Electric Vehicles

Ask Jack when his relationship with electric vehicles started, and the honest answer is decades before it was fashionable — with toy models in the early 1970s, inspired by the Lunar Rover and, of all things, golf carts. That instinct followed him through grad school (a VW Combi bus conversion that, by his own account, didn’t work) and crystallized in 1996 when he spotted his first electric bike, a Zapp, at a Real Goods store opening. From there the story reads less like a hobby and more like an infrastructure project: workshops at Appalachian State and NC State, a family that built its own solar vehicles for science fairs (a solar bike, a solar boat, a solar go-kart that hit 30 mph), and by 2002, a chapter of his own — the Triad Electric Vehicle Association of North Carolina, later recognized nationally by the Electric Auto Association as one of the best chapters in the country.

What’s remarkable is the range. Jack has raced (setting an autocross record in a BMW Cooper electric at Power of DC, an autocross and drag race event in Pennsylvania, in 2005), judged (Electrathon events in Seattle), converted (a 1985 Nissan King Cab he still owns, a Nissan 240X with Alamance Community College, trucks, tractors — including a 1976 Elektrak rebuilt with better batteries and a bigger controller), and taught (technician training offered worldwide through the Light Electric Vehicle Association, a certified training program developed with Don Gerhardt in 2014). He’s crossed countries in electric vehicles more than once — Washington to Disney World in 1999, World Solar Challenge in Australia in 2001, Route 66 from Chicago to LA in 2001 and again in 2003 — and helped generations of students do the same kind of hands-on work: the STEM Cycle project he ran from 2014 to 2018 challenged students to build small EVs against real engineering criteria, and the Shell Eco-marathon team he coached at Dudley High School didn’t just compete — they turned the experience into a professional documentary, The Road to Houston, that won first place at Cannes.

That same builder’s instinct is still running today. Jack’s current projects include a solar trailer, a solar research water drone (in development for two years), an adventure boat design, and a solar toy hauler he’s converting into a livable space. In 2026, he’s working on rebuilding a school bus into a mobile workshop and designing a vehicle to use as part of the STEM Road Show, a new traveling program built around electric vans and trailers. It’s the same throughline from the Lunar Rover model to the schoolbus workshop: if it moves, Jack wants to drive it.