When Worden was in seventh grade, he built himself an electric go-cart in his parents' backyard in Arlington, Massachusetts. Ever since then, Worden has had a dream. "I was never interested in getting rich," he says, "but I wanted to start a car company. I wanted to put millions of electric cars on the road. That would make the air cleaner--and life better for everyone."

Today Worden, 31, runs Solectria Corporation, an electric-car company he and his wife, electrical engineer Anita Rajan, started nine years ago. Solectria has sold more than 500 electric cars, pickup trucks and vans, as well as motors for electric buses.

Inventors Are Made, Not Born
Worden, one of five brothers and sisters, says the smartest thing his parents did was to forbid their kids to watch TV. For fun, he read biographies of inventors such as Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. On trash day, he dragged home appliances that other people had thrown out: old stereos, broken refrigerators. He took their motors apart to see how they worked. "I liked making things from nothing, like making electric motors with paper clips, wire and refrigerator magnets," he says.

In high school, Worden built a solar-powered electric car. It won first place in the Massachusetts State Science Fair. He continued to build new car models and drove one to and from college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.). While at M.I.T., he raced electric vehicles. He still holds the record for the highest speed reached by an electric car: 90 miles an hour!

A Dream Come True
Worden's factory is in a squat brick building in Wilmington, Massachusetts, just north of Boston. In one room, a man is threading battery wires into cars called Solectria Forces. The Forces use the bodies of Chevy Metros, gasoline-powered compact cars. Solectria removes most of the insides and puts in its own clean electric motor and other systems. The car can go 50 miles before it needs a battery recharge.

In another room, seven motors are lined up, ready to go into small pickup-truck bodies that Worden imports from China. After he converts them to electric power, he exports the trucks to South America and Southeast Asia.

Worden has another dream: to manufacture an electric car from scratch, rather than simply converting gas-powered cars. He has already designed one, the Solectria Sunrise. The car can go more than 200 miles on a single charge!

Worden insists that the future is sunny for electric cars, as more nations crack down on pollution. "Every electric vehicle that gets on the road helps clean up the earth," he says. "This technology is going to take off."