Stimulating EV Awareness, Experience, & Adoption — Afeez Alade-Kolawole
One of the wonderful things about working in the cleantech industry is, sappy as it sounds, the people. We aren’t at the early, early phases of industry growth, but we’re at an early enough stage that many of the leaders in the industry are still adventurous, compassionate people who are striving to help society.
On another note, when it comes to electric cars, one of their big advantages is that they are just fun, and that inherently fun aspect attracts fun-loving people.
Fitting all of the descriptions above, one EV leader I recently met is Afeez Alade-Kolawole. Afeez will be hopping over from London to join the coming Berlin+Wroclaw Cleantech Revolution Tour conference, where he’ll give a presentation on various ways of stimulating EV awareness, facilitating more EV experience among the broader population, and hastening the transition to electric vehicles.
Afeez is clearly a serial entrepreneur/ecopreneur. Since he has several super cool projects running, I figured I’d just quickly run down three of them as an intro.
I think Try My EV is the first EV initiative that he set up. Try My EV is a way for EV drivers to meet each other and test out other EVs in a fun way, and for non-EV drivers to experience EVs and learn about them from people who have first-hand experience with the cars and can genuinely answer their questions. It looks like a great idea — one I wish I had — and I just set up an account this week. (Though, I’m thinking not many Polish EV drivers are registered in the community at this point.)
Try My EV and Afeez helped to launch EVRT (EV Road Trip), which has explored the United Arab Emirates and Europe via electric car, but has a global aim in the long run. A big part of the idea is to show people how practical electric cars can be, how much fun they can be, and that they can take long road trips too. As an exciting initiative of adventure and EV fun, it’s not too surprising that Robert Llewellyn and Fully Charged picked up the story and joined the fun this year.
A third initiative Afeez launched is ECar Test Drive, which offers a more typical, formal, corporate approach to getting people into electric cars. The site helps to line potential electric car buyers up with great EV dealerships that will show them around in an electric car, answer their questions well, and not push them to a gasmobile. The ECar Test Drive team is attentive and tries to only partner with auto dealerships that will do right by people interested in clean, green, electric transport. Pretty cool, eh?
Afeez has one more EV startup rolling, Tesla Rentals. Yeah, that seems pretty straightforward, so we won’t dive in. 😀
Hopefully you can join us in Berlin for more on Afeez, his EV startups, and insights from years of EV entrepreneurial, activist, and driving (he has a BMW i3) experience. Learn more about the conference here or just head straight over to eventbrite and get a ticket (note that CleanTechnica Facebook fans can register using the $19/day rate).
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