SSI-Racing Story
Back Story

About our founder and CTO - Michael Kadie - The story starts 20 years ago when Magnum PI and Miami Vice were on TV during our previous gas crisis. Michael's friends were talking about how wonderful Ferrari's and Lamborghini's were while they grew up on American muscle cars. He read an article on hydrocarbon fuel cells and had the idea of taking a classic muscle car, like a Challenger, dropping this fuel cell in with an electric drive train to create a car that would get 85 mpg while being able to crush Ferrari's and Lamborghini's in the ¼ mile. He then did some research and found out this type of fuel cell requires $1000 worth of platinum per kw of power (1 kw = 1.3 hp). So the project was shelved; he thought maybe he could have scraped up $10k, but the platinum alone would have cost over a quarter million dollars.

Over the next 20 years Michael built a lot of things, including KDTalk and SSICMic. KDTalk came about when he was taking a road trip with a friend's wonderful family. They are literally the family featured on the news for adopting all of the disabled children that no one else will. Along the way he realized that he thought of Michael (a teen age boy with no fine motor control restricted to wheelchair) as not being smart because he had no way to communicate. As soon as he had this realization, he was very disappointed in himself. Michael started thinking about what it would take for this teen age boy named Michael to communicate effectively. He still had several days of road trip left when he got an idea and started getting details about Michael abilities and limitations. Then, he started building KDTalk, an interactive, portable device with a display this handicapped boy could read, buttons he could push (arcade style with doll plates glued to them). When he got excited it is easy for him to push the wrong button, or knock things over so it was important to design a very tolerant interface, both quick and flexible. He had seven most important things he could say with the push of a single button, and he could say anything he wanted in a somewhat optimized fashion. Plus, he and his parents could reprogram it in a fairly intuitive way. Mr. Kadie completed the project in two months while working full time on his Masters degree and teaching part time 50 miles away. Michael was "friggin' inspired", and it worked. Almost immediately, the teenage handicapped boy Michael entered a normalized 7th grade classroom. Mr. Kadie built a second one for a child named Tell who had a less severe problem and could use a keyboard to some extent (he was at a pre-reading stage). Michael's advisor told him to throw away his thesis work and write up what he had done because, “It is be best thing to come out of this university in the years that he has been here.” Michael had the easiest thesis defense of anyone - “Teenage boy Michael is did well in his 7th grade classes and beyond.” QED Mr. Kadie's research was valuable, QED Masters Degree.

Years later, Mr. Kadie and some friends built a robot called SSICMic (for Simple Solutions Inclusive Car - Mickey Mouse operation) for the DARPA Grand Challenge. The team needed another 1-2 weeks to make the semi-finals. It was a series hybrid electric vehicle that they built out of steel and motorcycle parts. This experience gave him the confidence and he started thinking about building his high school dream car.

Soon after, Michael cashed out of a good job due to "irreconcilable differences" with his manager. For the first time in his life he now found myself with time and money. So, he debated about what he was going to do next; pay down the house, travel the world for 2 years, startup some kind of business, or build his dream car. Well we know how that turned out. Mr. Kadie spent several months determining what was the sexiest, classic American muscle car reproduction that he could find and chose the Factory Five 65 Coupe. He went to a kit car build school, ordered the kit, talked to everyone with experience that would talk to him, searched the Internet, read books, did a lot of math and determined that at least half of everything contradicted everything else. All of this brought him to his original powertrain concept (and final one, for that matter); a system very similar (with some special modifications learned from experience) to the famous world record holder White Zombie: a Zilla motor controller, a big DC motor (320 kw, about 450 hp), lightweight batteries, a good stereo, and air shocks. Well there you have it the history behind our first engineering prototype, the 2SSIC 65 Coupe BEV, now ready for production builds for enthusiast customers.