A little over two weeks from now, on Oct 16, 2011, will be "National Plug-in Day". Organized by Plug-in America, the Electric Auto Association and the Sierra Club, it will be a day of awareness raising over the environmental, economic and other benefits of vehicles which can plug-in to electricity. They are staging simultaneous events in at least a dozen cities across the U.S. which will "sound the bell through plug-in parades, tailpipe-free tailgate parties, test-drives and other grassroots activities".
It is billed as being an opportunity to see real honest to goodness electric vehicles, talk with electric vehicle owners, view the equipment used with electric vehicles, and perhaps get a chance for a test drive in one.
The "flagship" event of this years Plug-in Day will be a huge parade in the Los Angeles area (specifically, Santa Monica, with another event in nearby Orange County), that will feature speeches by many luminaries including Chris Paine, director of the movies "Who Killed the Electric Car," and "The Revenge of the Electric Car."
Other events will be held around the country, primarily in the cities that were the focus of electric car sales over the last year or so. Event details are listed on the Plug-in America website, through the link below.
National Plug-in Day is, in part, a follow-on to the parade Plug-in America organized in Jan 2009 to coincide with President Obama's innauguration. That parade included owners of 78 electric vehicles, on the streets of Santa Monica CA. This was before the wave of electric vehicle production we're now enjoying, and the organizers of National Plug-in Day expect there to be many more EV's on-hand for the days events, if only because of the production and wide-spread availability of new vehicles.
It should be a good marker demonstrating just how far vehicle electrification has come in the last 2-3 years. In Jan 2009 there were few commercially made electric vehicles on the market and the parade included Tesla Roadsters, motorcycles from Brammo and Vectrix, home built electric conversions, RAV4-EV's, and an electric big truck from Balqon. At that time most existant EV's were either home built electric conversion vehicles, or else factory made EV's left over from the "EV Mandate" era 10+ years ago when GM was building the EV1 and S10E, Honda the EV+, Toyota the RAV4-EV, and Ford the Electric Ford Ranger.
Today we have excellent electric cars from Nissan and GM, and others coming to market soon from Fisker, Coda, Mitsubishi, Ford and other companies.
This change was due to policy decisions by both the Bush and Obama administrations, as well as technology improvements that make electric vehicles more practical than they ever have been.
See:
Comments