TLDR: We’re highschoolers who wrote a kid’s science book called Everything Tesla: From How They Work to How Fast They Go and Everything Fun In Between! We hope our book will inspire kids to love science and better understand how Tesla is helping to fight climate change.
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We’re Eliana and Aiden, 9th grade twins who love Teslas so much that we wrote a children’s science book about our favorite cars. When we first started writing this book 4 years ago, we planned a small 20 page book that we would self design. But as we researched more about Tesla cars and their technology, we couldn’t not include the new things we learned—not only did the size of the book grow, but also our expectations. We wanted to pass on this excitement to kids, and began aiming to create a professional quality book that could compete with other science books we loved. Little did we know how big of a project this would become! This post describes our journey from young Tesla fans to Tesla authors.
On March 31, 2016, our family was at Disneyland during Tesla’s Model 3 launch event. We watched the event from our hotel room and our dad reserved a Model 3 that night!
Two years later, our family got our Model 3, which we named Blueberry for its color. We were 4th graders then, and one of the first families at our school with a Model 3. All our friends loved the car—we’d pile 8 kids into it to play beach buggy racing. It was clear that Teslas were the cool cars of our generation! Excited about our new car, we began visiting news sites, like Teslarati, Electrek, and CleanTechnica, and watching YouTube videos to learn more about the car. We became especially interested in how Teslas worked and their technology.
Our Model 3 dressed up for Halloween!
Around this time, we became increasingly frustrated at how smokey the air would get from the California wildfires. A year later, we watched Our Planet on Netflix, which really brought the urgency of climate change home. We realized that we could combine our love for Teslas and books to write a book about how Teslas work. Getting other kids and their parents excited about Tesla's electric cars could be a way that we could help make a difference.
The smoke was so bad it made noon look like sunset.
But we didn’t know how to write a book. Was there a “right” way to do it? And if so, what were the professional steps to take? We started by looking through other science books, analyzing what made them interesting. We came up with two goals: 1) explain the science behind Tesla cars in an in-depth way, and 2) write the book to kids with the perspective of being a kid.
One of our bookshelves with other science books we loved.
We continued researching about the science behind Tesla cars, often turning to YouTube for specifics that we couldn’t find anywhere else. Teslarati, Electrek, and CleanTechnica also proved very helpful. We compiled this research into writing, which we eventually turned into giant Google Slide presentations. This is where we brainstormed the page layouts, figuring out which information to add, keep, or get rid of, and how to communicate the in-depth science behind Teslas in a kid-relatable way.
One of our Google Slide mock ups.
We spent a good chunk of time (months and months) revising, re-drafting, and re-writing in this Google Slides. The more time we spent, the more we realized that we wanted this book to be able to compete with professional science books—we began to have higher expectations. So we reached out to designers…which was followed by a lot of rejection. They said that our book was too unrealistic, that we didn’t know what we were doing, or that we didn’t think it through enough. One designer wrote us back with a set list of what she said was the correct way to write a book.
Her list was the set of “rules” we had wanted to know in the beginning. We hadn’t followed them at all.
After a lot of unknowns, we found designers Sadie Thomas and Karen Hood on the inside cover of a book called Car Science. We reached out to them both separately, and were very surprised when they said they were actually working together and Sadie was starting a new company: LS Design. Since we were new authors and they were a new company, it made sense to work together—plus, their enthusiasm, excitement, and belief in our book was super encouraging.
What the mock-up safety page turned into!
Working with designers and an editor, Alex Cox, brought a new challenge to writing the book. We had to make a conscious effort to keep a kids’ voice throughout the writing and designs—especially since, as we continued to get older, our opinions and ideas would change. Though we got comments about emojis and emoticons not having meaning, we wanted to use them throughout the book because we enjoyed them as kids. We added stick figures. We kept a whole page spread on Tesla’s farts, even though we thought it was more cringy now. Keeping our original kid voice worked out really well. We’ve heard reports of many kids loving parts of the book like the fart page. As new authors, hearing about kids reading the book at dinner or not wanting to go to bed yet, is super rewarding.
The fart page.
And then began the countless days of working with Sadie and Alex to make the book come to life, continuing to update the book as Tesla released new products, fact checking, and doing what it takes to make a book an actual book.
Deciding which font we wanted to use.
Last year, Eliana also got super lucky and was able to visit Tesla Engineering headquarters with her school for Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day. She really loved the visit, including seeing the work areas for some of the engineers. She loved how friendly all the employees at Tesla were.
Four years after we began this wild ride, we released Everything Tesla on March 20, 2024 into the wild on Amazon, and it hit #1 in Children’s Electricity! We did a book talk at our local Books Inc. Some Tesla employees showed up to our book talk to show their support and give us goodie bags. They were incredibly kind!
Launch event at Books Inc.
Kind Tesla employees who found out about our launch event and paid a visit!!
We also did an author talk at our old elementary school, where we hoped to pass on our love for science to 200 younger kids. Hopefully, these kids were encouraged to impact the world in their own way. We even got some fun news coverage from the same sites we visited to learn about Tesla!
Press & Reviews - Everything Tesla
Author talk at our old elementary school.
We’re also sending out 4 Traveling copies of our book. We’re starting these copies off at Superchargers and asking people to send us a text on where they got the book, and after reading it, to pass it off at another Supercharger. We’re hoping the books will eventually cross the country from the West Coast to the East Coast!
Later this week, we’re taking a road trip down to Disneyland and along the way we’re planning to stop at the Kettleman Supercharger site and the Petersen Automotive museum to see if they might consider carrying our book for sale. We’re also planning to drop by a few Tesla showrooms in LA to give them store copies for their “kids corners” and service waiting areas.
The Kettleman Supercharger in our book!
One of the things we love most about Tesla is the amazing community! The excitement we saw that so many people had for Teslas was a big reason we decided to write this book. As fellow Tesla fans, we thought you all might be interested in the book, and we’re happy to answer questions here too. It’s available on Amazon, and every purchase contributes to 1% for the Planet and moves us a step closer toward a more sustainable future!
Our sales of the book were really strong when news sites wrote about it—enough for the book to hit Top 50 in Children's Science books on Amazon! But since then, sales have dropped a lot to just a few copies a day. We think the book is super interesting to Tesla owners and Tesla has sold over 5 million cars, so we're hoping our low sales are mainly due to Tesla fans not knowing about the book. So we're going to work harder to try to think of creative ideas, like putting free copies in Tesla showrooms. If you have any ideas on how we can spread the word, please let us know, too! (We're also hoping that Tesla fans will tell their friends about the book because it helps to dispel Tesla rumors and we think it will help encourage more people to buy Teslas!)
Also, if you see something we got wrong, let us know, too. We asked a professor at Stanford to vet the trickiest science parts of the book—the battery pages—and we even asked our parents to go back through our reference articles and Youtube videos to fact check things a second time, after we did it once ourselves. But we’re still just kids…well maybe teens now
.If you have a child in your life (or just love learning about everything Tesla, including pages on SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Neuralink) you can find Everything Tesla here:
https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Tesla-They-Work-Between/dp/B0CFJ1M9F8/
Go Tesla!
Eliana and Aiden
P.S. We know everyone refers to the $25k Tesla as the Model 2, but we think it will be called the Model 4! We haven’t seen this prediction anywhere else yet, but it makes sense because it would be the missing letter in S3XY C4RS.
