Education Matters: Central Valley students get the chance to work on Trion’s Nemesis supercar
FRESNO COUNTY, Calif. (KSEE) – A group of Central Valley students are getting the opportunity of a lifetime where they will help build Trion’s Nemesis, a high-performance electric supercar with a million-dollar price tag.
The Trion Nemesis is an electric supercar that is not yet in production for the commercial market.
The car currently sits at the innovation center at Fresno County’s CTEC High School.
“When I saw the car and all of the fancy things that were going to be on it. I was really excited,” said Nathan Evans, a student at CTEC High School.
Evans, who is 16 years old, has every right to be excited. He, along with classmates from CTEC High and three other schools, including Fresno State, will help build this car.
“The students here will be building our chassis, they will be building some of the interior parts as well as some of the suspension parts,” said Quinton Dodson, Trion’s facilities manager.
Dodson was part of the Trion team that came to Fresno to make the announcement.
Kie Fair, the operations manager, says choosing these students to work on the project had a lot to do with what they saw in Fresno schools.
“We saw that these students in 10th grade, 11th grade are operating on a level as if they already had a job outside of graduating. That right there, we are very big on education,” Fair said.
They visited Duncan Polytechnical High School, which has a state-of-the-art heavy machinery program. They also spent time at CART, the Center for Advanced Research and Technology, and saw the work engineering and manufacturing students were doing.
At CTEC High School it was the welding and work students were mastering with Computer-Aided Design (CAD) that impressed the Trion team.
“The equipment that the kids are learning on is better than some of the equipment that I’m using at my shop and I have some of the best machines out there. These kids are learning from those machines at a high school level. That in itself is beyond impressive to me,” Dodson said.
CTEC Director Jonathan Delano says having students work on this project shows them how important their skills are and seeing someone like Richard Patterson, the CEO of Trion, trust them with this project makes it real.
“He puts something like this, puts the nemesis on our property and puts it in our shop and gets to be able to kids actually get to see the reality of it. It makes sense now,” Delano said.
Each school is expected to start work on the project in a matter of weeks. Their work has a lot to do with Trion looking at Fresno as a location for its manufacturing facility.
