Some feel that social media has no place in the car and is a dangerous distraction. But the Kansas City, Mo., high school students who signed up for an after-school program put together by the nonprofit group Minddrive may beg to differ.

The group of at-risk high schoolers and their mentors at Minddrive built an electrified 1967 Karmann Ghia and modified it so that runs on posts, mentions and likes on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Next week, the team will drive the Karmann Ghia from Kansas City to Washington, D.C., to meet with elected officials to promote education funding and projects like Minddrive.

To get from K.C. to D.C. -- and to raise awareness about their project as well as their cause -- the group has integrated an Arduino microprocessor into the Karmann Ghia’s electric drivetrain, and it’s programmed to allow the car to move only via social media mentions of the project. 

As of now, the team has 8,975 of the total 71,040 watts needed to reach D.C., and different social media sites have different levels of energy (the most coming from a signature for the group's White House petition, at 10 watts each). Minddrive calls the publicity stunt “social fuel,” and it’s designed to teach the students an important marketing lesson about the effort needed to reach an audience. Each year, Minddrive matches at-risk high school students with mentors who motivate them with a car-building project. It culminates with the students taking their creation on a road trip.

“We want them to say, when it’s all over, ‘I can’t believe we did something like this,’” Steve Rees, Minddrive's CEO and the program’s director, told Wired Autopia. “It gives them the sense of being able to go back to school and do anything.”

The Karmann Ghia's basic Volkswagen drivetrain is an ideal initiation platform for kids who may have no previous hands-on automotive experience, and it’s the third car that the Minddrive team has electrified. Previous projects included a Reynard Champ Car and a 1977 Lotus Esprit.

Each Minddrive project also has a marketing communications component. For this year’s Social Fuel Tour, digital marketing agency VML agreed to work pro bono to help spread the word as well as teach students how to use social media as a business tool.

“It’s been a really great way to teach them how to use social media appropriately,” said Linda Buchner, Minddrive's president, who also directs the project's communications program, “and to teach them to represent themselves and Minddrive as a brand.”

A team of 20 students will drive the Karmann Ghia to the nation's capitol, stopping along the way at schools and technical centers in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to give presentations. The trip concludes with a news conference on Capitol Hill on June 6, when the students plan to address the need for more experiential-learning programs like Minddrive