2019 was a busy year!

Westport Police Department

The Westport Police Department is getting a Model 3 to be used as a patrol car. The club worked with Foti Koskinas, Chief of Police, providing information, allowing member vehicles to be used for test drives, and made introductions to Tesla in Mt. Kisco, NY (since there are still no Tesla stores permitted in CT). Westport PD is working with Whelen Engineering and Fleet Auto Supply to outfit the car with the features required for law enforcement. A more detailed description, updated as new information becomes available is here.

Legislation

The club has remained engaged with legislators, has offered testimony in Hartford, and is on the steering committee of the CT EV Coalition. It is through the coalition that many of the more complex initiatives are addressed, such as the DEEP EV Roadmap and the Transportation Climate Initiative. Coalition partners include the Connecticut Fund for the Environment, Sierra Club, Acadia Center, Plug-in America – 29 organizations altogether. This is the summary of comments prepared by the CT Fund for the Environment regarding the EV Roadmap.

EV Adoption Data

For our Interactive EV Dashboard, we are now in rhythm with our FOIA requests and the Department of Motor Vehicles to obtain semi-annual data dumps to continue our detailed tracking of EV adoption in the state. Next update expected in the first quarter of 2020.

 

Showcases

We receive numerous requests for EV showcases and have been doing a better job of vetting the opportunities to secure good visibility. This year included showcases at the Westport Maker Faire, STEAMFest at Housatonic Community College, Wilton Zero Waste Faire, Fairfield Green Wheels NDEW, among others. Which leads us to a question. There are more and more of these in more places around the state. With most of the membership in Fairfield County, it is hard for us to get to all of them. For those of you on this list from around the state who are interested in participating in these events, we can connect people with events near them. Please reply to this mailbox if you have any interest! We will keep the names on file for when the time comes. Please make sure to let us know what town you live in and which EV you drive.

Climate Strike

Climate Strike Rallies – Club members participated in events in Hartford, New York, and Westport.

EV Shopper Study

The Sierra Club reached out to the club for help with the shoppers they needed for CT for its second EV Shopper Study, called REV Up Electric Vehicles. The depressing, though not surprising, highlight, was that 74% of dealers did not have an EV on the lot. A blog post about the study with a link to the full Sierra Club release can be found here.

Presentations

The club gives presentations about EVs, covering basic info, adoption, future outlook. The most recent was done at the Greenwich Environmental Lecture Series – Trends to Watch in the Energy Transformation of 2020.

Website

We have transitioned the website to reflect our current branding at EVClubCT.com. We recently added an events calendar. It is the basic version, which requires the admin to enter the info. If you know of an EV event that would be worth posting, please send us the info via the website contact form. Send us the name of the event, location (including actual street address), date/time, event website (if there is one), event sponsor, graphic if you have one, brief description.

Last But Not Least

More people came to us this year than in the past looking for advice on buying an EV. Whether it was a dealer recommendation, questions about incentives or charging, or asking to be connected with the owners of a particular vehicle, we were able to help people navigate their way to driving electric.