How to get into car engineering/making
mechanical_fish: I will give you two answers.The first one is this book: Build your Own Sports Car for as Little as 250 Pounds... And Race It!http://www.amazon.com/Build-Your-Sports-Little-£250/dp/18596...a book which, oops, appears to have become priceless since I bought it years ago. I guess it's out of print. This is a suspiciously similar version:http://www.amazon.com/Build-Your-Own-Sports-Car/dp/184425391...... which the Amazon reviewers critique for being "Eurocentric". Oh, what a terrible problem that must be. Unless you live in Zurich! Wink, wink. ;)I'm being serious here: As an American, I am constitutionally required to insist that the correct way to learn how cars work is from the ground up. Get a car. Take it apart. Then put it together again. Do they have autocross in Zurich? Amateur rally racing? Sports car clubs? Trade schools that will teach you a course in basic auto repair? Try 'em all. In the USA, at any rate, it is very easy to find people who spend more time thinking about cars and driving than is healthy.You don't need to work for Tesla to build an electric car. Take a small car and convert it to electric:http://www.diyelectriccar.com/---The other answer is: If you dream of working at a company like Tesla, find someone who works at Tesla and ask them what the job is like. That's the only way. You might hear back from someone here on HN itself, so asking here was a fine plan.What you should not do -- at first -- is find some school that claims to teach you everything you need to know to be an automotive engineer. It turns out that schools are very happy to sell you education whether or not you actually need or want it. But I've lost count of the number of people I know who decided they might like career X, spent years in school studying X, then turned up for work and discovered that they really don't like X. Try to sample your chosen career as much as you can before you actually spend years learning to do it properly.