Students in Kansas City, Missouri created a car powered by tweets, Facebook likes and Instagram shares.

Using an old-school Volkswagen Karmann Gia engineers-in-training, who were anything but old, rebuilt it into an electric car.

The high school students designed the car to cruise like it never could back in 1967.

What drives the car is far from traditional energy, it runs on social fuel.

It starts with a tweet that sends a signal into a little box in the car that lets it know that it has social fuel and can start running.

"Social media being used to power a car that they built is just so perfect," said Linda Buchner, president of Minddrive.

Every tweet, Facebook like, and Instagram share gets routed through a server. If they don't have enough social media buzz, that little black box can actually cut power to the electric engine.

"It's designed so that when we stop for charging, if we don't have enough social fuel the car won't start again,” said Buchner. “But it's not going to leave us stranded on the side of the highway with a bunch of teenagers."

The students and mentors from the Minddrive program are preparing to drive their creation from Kansas City to Washington, D.C. to lobby lawmakers for hands-on education.

"I got to move around, do stuff, so I wasn't sitting at a desk for an hour, having teachers just go up here and show you, we actually got to get our hands dirty," said Minddrive student Cornel Foster.

Minddrive started as an after school program working on cars at one high school and quickly grew to draw in kids from several inner-city schools.

"We're trying to provide a hook, a way to ignite their interest that they each have inside of them," said Buchner.

"It gave me some motivation, I would think. I had a set goal of being a professional athlete at first, not really caring about honestly, my degree or anything like that,” said student Kelvin Duley. “But I guess, this car has changed my perspective about how much a degree or education matters."

Taking that message on the road will count on your tweets, likes and shares to get them there, and beyond.