Vermonters make plenty of cool things: ice cream, snowboards, hats. But the coolest? Hands down it’s Alia, Beta Technologies’ sleek, “Jetsons”-esque electric airplane. If the company’s recent $1 billion debut on the New York Stock Exchange didn’t convince you of that, look no further than Beta’s newest accolade: On November 19, Alia won the inaugural Coolest Thing Made in Vermont award from the Vermont Chamber of Commerce.
Chamber president Amy Spear said there were 60 nominations for the award, from which an independent panel of local manufacturers and business leaders chose the winners. There was no cash prize, but winners and finalists were recognized at the Vermont Manufacturing Summit in Burlington this week.
Alia faced stiff competition in the award’s business category. The Splitray Supercar is built by Rothspeed, a five-person Milton automaker. While its carbon-fiber body looks like that of a classic 1966 Corvette Stingray, its innards are all new — and, with the exception of Australian electronics, completely manufactured in the U.S. The handmade car boasts a top speed of 175 miles per hour, propelled by an 800-horsepower engine. Building it for Vermont roads, cofounder Scott Roth said, has made the company “more crafty and savvy” than its competitors. “It’s a tough environment,” his colleague Josh Munson added. “It’s forced us to really optimize.”
The other finalist, WheelPad’s SuitePAD, is a wheelchair-accessible bedroom and bathroom suite that can be easily added to a home. Architect Joseph Cincotta started working on it after his godson was in an accident that left him paraplegic. In addition to being highly functional — including a track for a hoist — and light enough to haul with a large pickup truck, SuitePAD had to feel like “the coolest room in the house,” Cincotta said.
At the awards ceremony at Hotel Champlain on Wednesday, much of the buzz was for finalists in the competition’s Coolest Thing Made by a Career Technical Education (CTE) or Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) Program. The high schoolers on the Green Mountain Robotics team built a “Champ” robot that simulates repairing a coral reef. Welding students at Lyndon Institute created a steel structure to protect the town’s 1878 Miller’s Run covered bridge from trucks crashing into it. A class at the North Country Career Center engineered an automated air “blow-off” system for a Newport manufacturer to help keep machinery clean and avoid downtime. And Raphaël Mitchell, a student at Middlebury’s Patricia A. Hannaford Career Center doing a 10th grade project, modified a Power Wheels toy into a functional mobility device for a toddler with cerebral palsy.
The winning project, also from the Hannaford center, is very cool and very basic: an 8-by-30-foot tiny house on wheels. Construction technology instructor Nick Cantrick built it with students over the course of two years and partnered with Addison County nonprofit Homes First to find a resident who needed affordable housing. The class, Cantrick said, is currently working on its second tiny house.
Lt. Gov. John Rodgers, who presented the awards, extolled the value and necessity of Vermont high schoolers having access to technical education centers as a way of boosting Vermont manufacturing. But the best evidence of the programs’ effectiveness was given by Kyle Clark, founder and CEO of Beta Technologies, accepting the award for Alia.
“I’m a tech center grad,” he said, from the Center for Technology, Essex. “I went on to school, taking the skills from the tech center — Beta was my senior thesis project in college.”
