Everyone Loves Their EV

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For any image in this article, click to see bigger & better version. Also, bonus points to anyone who spots the amazing fun fact about one of the people I met today.

In the EV internet, there’s a lot of shade. Far too much shade. People throw shade on every electric vehicle under the sun. There are critics of the Nissan LEAF, critics of the Chevy Volt & Chevy Bolt, critics of the BMW i3, the Ford Energi models, Tesla’s premium-class cars, and everything else.

In the real world, every EV model has owners who love it — a lot of them — and there’s no reason for anyone to hate on any of these cars. They are cutting emissions, reducing pollution, boosting public health, and bringing people joy.

I attended two National Drive Electric Week events this year. Matt Pressman of EV Annex wrote a great piece summarizing the first one, held last Saturday at a shopping mall hosting 8 ChargePoint chargers and a Tesla store with its own block of Tesla destination chargers. And I have to say it was a pleasure spending much of the day and evening with Matt — one of my favorite people in the world.

Today, I ventured over to the second event, which was located at The Florida House (a great site to visit if you’re ever in the region). Some of the same people brought their electric cars over to this locale, and others joined who weren’t at the one a week before.

As I took a shower cleaning the layers and layers of Florida sweat off of me, I finally got the idea for my summary article on my several hours at the two great show & tells. The takeaway is that everyone loves their EV. I met the owner of the first (yes, first!) Rimac Concept_One (who was there with his Tesla Model X P100D). He also had an early Nissan LEAF. He loved all of his EVs. I talked with a couple of owners of a Ford C-Max Energi. They love their great, practical PHEV. I met owners of Chevy Volts, BMW i3s, a Ford Focus Electric, electric bikes, and of course Teslas — Model S, Model X, and Model 3. Everyone loved their cars.

Of course, this was a biased sample — they were people who decided to spend several hours on a Saturday to show of their cars and see others. Nonetheless, the point is the same — every electric car model has owners that absolutely love them and saw them as the best car purchase or lease they could make.

It was great chatting with diverse owners and finding out what each of them appreciated about their car.

The one disappointing thing is that there weren’t a lot of visitors. I was hoping more EV-curious people would be stopping in to ask about electric cars, gets rides in them, and test drive them. Next year, I think CleanTechnica will put in some cash and effort to get more press about events in order to bring in more non-EV drivers.

One man and his son started walking up to the event today with curious but slightly bewildered eyes. I greeted him and it turned out he thought it was a farmer’s market. When he found out it wasn’t, he and his son turned around and I guess went in search of food elsewhere.


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Zachary Shahan

Zach is tryin' to help society help itself one word at a time. He spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as its director, chief editor, and CEO. Zach is recognized globally as an electric vehicle, solar energy, and energy storage expert. He has presented about cleantech at conferences in India, the UAE, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA, Canada, and Curaçao. Zach has long-term investments in Tesla [TSLA], NIO [NIO], Xpeng [XPEV], Ford [F], ChargePoint [CHPT], Amazon [AMZN], Piedmont Lithium [PLL], Lithium Americas [LAC], Albemarle Corporation [ALB], Nouveau Monde Graphite [NMGRF], Talon Metals [TLOFF], Arclight Clean Transition Corp [ACTC], and Starbucks [SBUX]. But he does not offer (explicitly or implicitly) investment advice of any sort.

Zachary Shahan has 7324 posts and counting. See all posts by Zachary Shahan