JUSTICE’S PARTICIPATION in the X Prize competition was, if not a happy accident, certainly another ironic twist in the Wikispeed origin story. After graduating from Wyoming in 2004, he’d moved to Denver, where he worked as a software engineer. He was still goosing his Honda to go faster, but it had topped out at 155 miles per hour. That wasn’t fast enough, so he decided to design and build his own ultralight car from the ground up. (Remember, he didn’t actually want to drive fast; he just wanted to prove he could.) A few years went by. He moved to Seattle with his new wife, and his work on the car continued, although slowly. Gas mileage was the furthest thing from his mind, but then in 2008, when the X Prize was announced, he realized his theories on cutting weight could also cause a car to sip gas. He submitted an application that outlined how he’d achieve 100-mile-per-gallon fuel efficiency—what would become the SGT01 was still just a chassis and a set of CAD drawings at this point—and was accepted in November 2008. Of the more than 100 teams that made it that far, 27 advanced to the final rounds at the speedway.
When Justice showed up in Hillsdale in May 2010, Bryan Ford expected to see a vehicle that needed a few last-second tweaks. Justice had, after all, been working feverishly on the SGT01 at night and on weekends for two years. But what rolled off the trailer had, in Justice’s words, “the bare minimum”: a chassis, a body, four wheels, a seat, a steering wheel, and a working engine. The taillights weren’t mounted properly. The rearview mirrors hadn’t been mounted at all. The parking brake needed adjustments. The body, a fiberglass shell that was a precursor to the current carbon fiber version—and what Wikispeed members still affectionately call the “shoebox”—wasn’t even painted. So they worked through the night, and with Ford’s wife bringing them coffee, making them breakfast, and lending a hand when she could, they finished it all and got the car to the speedway on time. Barely. “We were loading it onto the trailer with the paint sticking to our fingers,” Ford says. “It was that close, down to the wire.”
And yet within an hour of unloading, they faced elimination—and the car hadn’t even made it out of the paddock and onto the track. Without even bothering to look at the finite element analysis and computational fluid dynamics Justice had brought as proof of his design’s validity, the inspector rejected the car outright. Justice felt like he’d been slapped in the face. “It was like fireworks going off in my cheeks,” he says. “This is something I’ve had a whole lot of design input into, and this one person is saying, ‘This isn’t good enough.’ ”
Ford expected Justice to put down his tools, thank the group for their efforts, and pack it in. It would have been the logical thing to do. Instead, Justice whipped out a laptop and started plotting how to get the work done. “I’m going to go down the list, and I’m going to start calling out tasks,” he said. “And if you think it’s something you can handle or something you can even do a little bit of, I need you to own it.”
Remember that modularity thing, the computer-industry concept that makes it easy to upgrade individual parts of the car? That’s what saved Justice when he should have had to fold. Rather than spending hours pulling apart the SGT01 to get to the suspension, the team simply unbolted the body, removed the suspension module, and began fabricating a new one. They got it done, too, just in time. The only problem was that as they finished, minutes before the deadline, Justice and another team member cut a wire in the electrical system. The car wouldn’t start, and Wikispeed’s run for the X Prize was done. They finished in a tie for 10th in their division.
Up until the first technical inspection, working alongside Justice and the rest of the Wikispeed team was just a diversion for Ford, an excuse to hang out at the speedway. “But that’s when I started believing in Joe,” he says of the moment when Justice rallied. “He doesn’t say, ‘Is that possible?’ He says, ‘Why isn’t it possible? What’s stopping us?’ He’s young enough, brilliant enough, and enough of a motivator to be able to pull something like this off.” Ford is currently building two Wikispeed cars in his Hillsdale shop.
“CAN I ASK YOU to not make our family the focus of your story?” That’s Mary Michael Justice, Joe’s oldest sister and one of Wikispeed’s lead project managers. Although she’s proud of her family’s involvement, she’s concerned that I’ll overlook the contributions of the team’s more than 100 members. Without question, Wikispeed is hardly just a Justice family project. Volunteers across the country toil in their garages every night after work, testing brake designs, fabricating new bodies, brainstorming ways to make the car just a little more fuel efficient. They dial in to a conference call Thursday nights to report progress and discuss upcoming goals. And after that weekly call the Seattle members converge on Joe’s garage to weld, drink beer, and exchange high fives.
Justice demurred when I suggested the volunteers donate all that time because they believe so strongly in him. “If I was asking all of these people to come over and put a new roof on my house, I wouldn’t have this team,” he said. And, yeah, that may be true, but it’s not a fair comparison. He’s asking them to help him build a car to change the automotive industry, and as the X Prize competition proved, there are plenty of inventors trying to do that. Technically, Wikispeed volunteers could work for any of those start-ups, but they’re inspired by Justice’s ideas, and he’s invested himself so completely in this project that he’s become his ideas. He gets up and shuffles out to the garage in the middle of the night when a solution for improving the car’s drivetrain comes to him. He’s poured $200,000 of his own money into Wikispeed. He travels around the country, extolling the virtues of Wikispeed’s manufacturing methodology at software engineering conferences. It was at one of those conferences in Seattle in January 2011 that Jeff Lopez-Stuit saw Justice speak. “I walked into it thinking, ‘This guy is just dorking around with something in his garage,’ ” Lopez-Stuit says. “By the time Joe’s talk was over, I was practically in tears.” He ran up to Justice afterward, gave him a hug, and joined the team on the spot.
And that may be another reason Justice is so freaking upbeat: He has to be if he wants to shield the rest of the Wikispeed team—and maybe even himself—from the soul-crushing reality that launching an automotive company that can elbow its way into the industry and actually make money is about as easy as changing a tire without a jack. Tesla Motors, the electric-car manufacturer that just opened a showroom in Bellevue last November, launched in 2003 and has yet to be profitable—and that’s after raising nearly half a billion dollars in two stock offerings. So far Wikispeed has raised half a million, and Justice is still looking for about $400,000 in additional funding to begin production on a second Wikispeed model, what he calls the “comfy commuter car.”
Justice isn’t even the first wannabe carmaker in Washington. In 1984 a 27-year-old Western Washington University grad named Craig Henderson built the Avion, an arrowhead-shaped, gas-powered car that two years later set the Guinness World Record for fuel efficiency, at 103.7 miles per gallon. Like Justice, he had orders from two customers and planned to go into production in the fall of ’86, he told a reporter back then. He never finished a second car. “It was too complex of a product to sell,” he says. Today, having fallen well short of revolutionizing the automotive industry, Henderson builds boats to pay the bills. (Those two customers, by the way, were fictitious. Henderson admits now with a laugh that a “PR guy” told him to make them up just to build buzz.) He still has the original Avion and occasionally drives it to the grocery store. “Most products you see on the market today are not very complicated,” he told me as we stood next to the mold for the car’s body, which leans up against a shed on his property in Bellingham and has become a nest for yellow jackets. “But here I decided to build a car, which is the most complicated sort of product you can make. Call it confidence through ignorance.”
Despite the odds stacked against him, Justice remains unbowed. He’s convinced Wikispeed’s nimble nature will make it easier for him to compete without gobs of money. In fact, only once in a month of spending time with him did I see his ironclad positivity show any signs of weakening. It was early November, about a week before he was scheduled to speak about Wikispeed at the TEDx Rainier conference, a local offshoot of the national gathering of innovators and forward thinkers. He’d just finished presenting a dry run of his speech to the event’s curators, and now he was standing on stage listening to their notes.
“This is not TEDx-like,” one said bluntly. And for the next several minutes, he was—politely—eviscerated. The speech was too long. It was too dry. The accompanying slides were wordy and wonky. There was a nugget of a good idea somewhere deep in the presentation, but it needed to be presented with more coherence and verve. Justice stood stoically, taking their criticisms, only occasionally protesting that certain parts they wanted to cut—like how his agile methodology was more cost effective than his competitors’ approach to manufacturing—showed why Wikispeed is so innovative. There is a perfectly logical reason why each of these facts has been included, his eyes seemed to plead. Why don’t you understand?
Instead, he composed himself, clasped his hands, and said, “I love that you have a lot of background in what we’re doing here so you can coach me on what’s missing from my speech.” He thanked them, and then he smiled. Not quite as wide as he was accustomed, but wide nonetheless.
Published: January 2012
Loved the article, Joe. Keep at it. Gloria