Carts & Coffee Returns November 18: We’ll Break It On Purpose
Your students are going to work on electric vehicles. The question is whether they learn on one first.
Carts & Coffee is back for a second session on Wednesday, November 18, 2026, 9 to 10 AM Pacific. It is free, it is one hour, and it is built around the EV Trainer Cart: a complete, running AC drivetrain on an open frame.
We start it. We break something on purpose. Then we diagnose it live, the same way your students will. Real motor, real inverter, real pack, real fault. Nothing simulated and nothing on a slide.
Why an open frame
Most EV training equipment is a screen with a diagram on it. The EV Trainer Cart is the opposite. Motor, inverter, DC-DC converter, onboard charger, BMS, and a real battery pack, all mounted where a student can see them and trace a high-voltage cable from one to the next with a finger instead of a callout arrow.
These are the same components that go into the conversions EV West builds. They are not teaching mockups.
Fault injection is the point
A running system teaches a student what normal looks like. A broken one teaches them everything else.
The cart has built-in diagnostic ports and a set of sample faults. The instructor injects one, the student tracks it down. No answer key, and no waiting for a car to fail on its own halfway through a semester. We run this live at the fifteen-minute mark.
It plugs into a wall outlet
No lift. No dedicated high-voltage room. No electrical service upgrade and no facilities request that dies in a queue for two budget cycles. The cart runs off a standard 110V outlet, rolls on casters between classrooms, and stores against a wall.
If your shop has an outlet and a floor, you can run it.
What comes with it
A full curriculum and instructor training ship with the cart. Lesson structure, the fault sequence, what to demonstrate in what order, and how to assess it. It was written by Mark Weller, who taught college automotive for twenty years before he built this thing, so it is written from the teaching side rather than from a product manual.
The cart is $32,995 fully assembled and running. One cart, one drivetrain, and you choose which: a NetGain Hyper 9 or a Tesla drive unit. The frame, the curriculum, and the diagnostic workflow are identical either way.
If you cannot get to San Marcos
The full session streams live: the cart, the fault injection, the diagnosis, the curriculum walkthrough, and the Q&A. Register the same way and the stream link goes out the day before.
At 9:00 AM Pacific it is noon on the East Coast, so most instructors can watch this over lunch without leaving campus.
| Reserve your seat |
| WHERE EV West, 1788 La Costa Meadows Dr #100, San Marcos CA | COST Free |
| WHO IT’S FOR Auto tech instructors, CTE directors | CAN’T TRAVEL Full livestream |
Building a budget request? Email sales@evwest.com with the subject “EV Trainer – [your school]” and include your program size, funding source, and target semester, and we will format the quote for your purchasing office.