Today was the first club meetup for the new year. We had it at a new venue this time: the Tesla Merritt Island service center. Every make and model is always welcome to our club and meetups. We had a Ford Mustang Mach-E, two Chevy Bolts, a Mitsubishi Outlander plug in hybrid, and all 4 models of Tesla: Model S, 3, X, Y. There were even a couple of electric bicycles that dropped in! Everyone got to see the new steering wheel in one of the Model S called the yoke. It looks like the yoke you would see in an airplane and allows perfect view of the instrument cluster. Some like it and some people don’t. After driving with it for a while most people change their minds and become used to it and turn out to love it. Several non EV drivers showed up to have their questions answered to help them shop around for their next car. Everyone determined the next month meet up for February would be at the same place. So watch our upcoming events page to get the day and time.
For our First Sunday of the Month meetup this time we met again at the Crafty Crab at Hammock Landing in Palm Bay. This is one of the restaurants that has a space big enough for our growing club and is near the charging stations there at Hammock Landing. So once again we were able to show the manager how much extra business the charging stations have brought in. It shows how the charging stations act like advertisements to have customers choose your business over a competitor’s if you have a charging station. This makes it easy to say that the cost of a charging station can come out of your marketing budget. See our charging station info page if you want to learn more about getting a charging station for your business.
We talked about a few things about our electric cars and the new software updates from Tesla that gave Youtube and Netflix and other great features like smart summon that lets you call the car from the parking lot and it drives itself to you standing at the door to the mall. There’s also Caraoke that lets you see the lyrics on the giant screen in the middle of the dash so you can sing karaoke in your car.
Dischord! We use this for chats and planning so we don’t spam everyone’s email. And for sharing news.
We were invited to Earth Day at KSC. Ford might bring their prototype mustang inspired EV! This is a big if though so let’s not give our hopes up.
Check out prices on MyEV.com and tell everyone you know! This is the best place to learn about EVs while you shop for used electric vehicles without having to filter out gasoline powered cars. You can find a used EV on there for around $7000 for the older models. Did you know the original Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt are already 10 years old!? We’ve had production EVs for a decade already and people still think they are something brand new! Take a look and see if there’s a used EV in your future.
Fully Charged Live will be in Austin, TX on Feb 1 and 2. Get your tickets now to attend if you want to go. We won’t be setting anything up but just want everyone to know this is happening. www.fullycharged.show
EV News Daily podcast. 15 or so minutes a day to listen to all the EV and clean energy related news for the day so you don’t have to go read the articles yourself. A great time saver!
If you need a blue polo you can order it from Florida Boy in 5th ave Indialantic. Tell them it’s for the Space Coast EV Drivers electric car club. Say Men’s or Women’s style (men’s has a button in the V-neck) and size S, M, L, XL, or XXL and if you want your name embroidered on the opposite chest from our logo. We have magnetic name tags if you don’t since it costs extra.
This month we met at the cafe in the lobby of the Courtyard by Marriott in Cocoa Beach. We came back here because of the free EV chargers right outside in the parking lot. We make sure to let the manager and staff know that all of this business was brought in because of those chargers and that they are paying for themselves. If you want to know more about the different kinds of charging stations, how they work, and how to get them installed at your business to bring in more customers, visit our charging station info page here.
We went over the last event that was just held at FIT, Camp Epic. Children ages 11-14 got to see a few EVs up close, ask questions about them, and learn about them with Mars and space themed activities.
Everyone requested another order of window decals that stick inside the glass for our members. This is because we keep sticking business cards on cars that are already in the club. If we had a window decal we would know they were already in the club. These stickers have been ordered using club funds and ready to give out. to members.
We also said hello to our newest member, Adam. He already has been driving a Chevy Volt for some time and found our group. That brings up our total membership to 120 EVs and 131 members.
Next month’s meeting will be at Squid Lips in Eau Gallie. There is a charging station next door at the library. We like to remind the manager that installing more charging stations at the restaurant would bring in even more business.
The main focus of the meetup was to make sure everyone had tasks for getting ready for National Drive Electric Week (NDEW). This is the last full month we have for planning it and getting the word out. Our flyer is ready and we are contacting newspapers, radio stations, and news outlets to really get the word out. We’ll be recording a Coastal Connections with WFIT a few weeks before the event as well. If you haven’t signed up to attend the Satellite Beach NDEW for Saturday Sept 14 please go to our official event page and do so here. The Space Coast EV Drivers will be doing the work for setting up and planning that event. There will be a second NDEW event the following Saturday Sept 21 in Cape Canaveral at the Manatee Sanctuary Park. The city will be planning and preparing that event so the Space Coast EV Drivers will only need to bring our cars for the Q&A and ride and drives. Sign up for that event on the Cape Canaveral NDEW official event page here. We hope to break more than 70 EVs in one place this year so if you want to see many different makes and models of EVs in one place at one time this is the event you’ve been waiting for. We’ll see you in September!
For our first Sunday of the month electric vehicle meetup we met at the Pizza Gallery at the Avenue in Viera. We had a full room with 22 people at the table including a few new members. We added some more EVs to the club including more Tesla Model 3 cars. We’ve noticed over the years no other make/model has grown this fast as the Tesla Model 3. We talked to the manager and let them know that all of this business was brought in because of the new charging station the Avenue recently installed.
We talked about the next upcoming event for our club to bring our personal vehicles to for answering questions. It will be the Camp EPIC at Florida Tech on July 19 from 1-3 pm. If you want to see any of our events and get more details please visit our upcoming events page.
The main event that needs the most attention and planning and help with tasks is the National Drive Electric Week coming up in September. We have it planned for Saturday September 14 from 10 am to 4 pm at the Schechter Center in Satellite Beach. We are going to try to have more than 60 EVs all in the one parking lot from all different makes and models for the public to see and take ride and drives around the block. It’s also the best time to ask questions because they are our personal cars that we drive every day so we’ll have all the best answers from experience of living with them.
This month we met at the old Moon Hut in Cape Canaveral, now La Fiesta Mexican restaurant. We had 20 people including the new Sustainability Manager for Cape Canaveral, Zach Eichholz. He gave us a quick list of the things on his to-do list for the city:
The city has four, dual ClipperCreek chargers. They are spread out over several locations like city hall, the library, and Manatee Park. There will be six more coming this year! More will be added to city hall. Some will be added to the wastewater treatment plant for city fleet Ford Focus EV and future fleet plug in vehicles. We reminded him instead of waiting for Rivian and Tesla to come out with their 100% electric pick up trucks they can already get plug in hybrid work trucks from VIA Motors and Workhorse. He wants to see it go to 20 chargers all over the city.
Zach mentioned the chargers have not added any noticeable amount to the city’s power bill. This is important to know that it is OK to give the power away for free because it will pay for itself many times over with all the extra business it will bring from EV owners spending money in the local restaurants and shops.
We have three events to add to the calendar: Camp epic, solar tour of homes, founders day. We will be doing National Drive Electric Week (NDEW) on Saturday Sept 14 in Satellite Beach.
We had our monthly meetup on the 2nd Sunday of the month instead of the first so we could have our visitors from Norway meet with us. They found out about us from the EV News Daily podcast. If you haven’t subscribed to it yet we highly recommend it! They just got their new Tesla Model 3 and their child is a student at FIT. Since they were visiting FIT anyway we thought it would be the perfect time to meet up and talk about electric cars and charging stations. They introduced us to a company in Norway called Zaptec that builds smart charging stations that can split up the power as more cars plug in. This is different from running a dedicated circuit from the breaker box to each individual charger. This way with Zaptec chargers you only need the one, big circuit and as each car plugs in it will slow down the charge to the other cars so you can have many more cars charging that would normally be allowed. This makes the most sense for apartment and condo complexes. Thai Thai House at Hammock Landing was a great spot to have our meetup and we’ll be back there again in the future. We agreed that next month we should meet at Ginger & Garlic in Rockledge.
Today was the first Sunday of the month, January 6, 2019. Also the first Sunday of the new year!
We met at the Cottage Irish Pub in the Eau Gallie section of Melbourne. We went over a few things for the club, talked about how to submit your photo and blurb for the member bios page, delivered another blue polo shirt to a new member and shared some EV news. Most importantly we all got to meet the our newest member with their brand new Tesla Model 3.
We have an upcoming event on January 24 for our local Sierra Club chapter in Rockledge. We’ll bring as many different makes and models as possible to show everyone all the differences and what to look for when shopping for an EV. We’ll also give a presentation about the club and how we’ve grown to over 100 members and over 100 electric vehicles.
We are planning to do another large EV car show in Satellite Beach for Earth Day. Here’s some of the preliminary information about that event: https://driveelectricearthday.org
Don’t forget you can always go to our upcoming events page to see when our next public event is scheduled.
We met this month at the Crafty Crab at Hammock Landing and went over everything needed to get ready for National Drive Electric Week. The main idea is we are in SERIOUS PUSH MODE for getting the word out. Tell everyone you know to sign up to attend at our official event page here: https://driveelectricweek.org/event.php?eventid=1235
We also printed some flyers for everyone to hand out at every place you visit and also ask if you can hang them up. You can download and print the flyer from here if you want to print a few of them yourself to help get the word out:
Next, two of our members will record the radio spot at WFIT to play the two weeks before the event. So look for a post about that in our September monthly meetup post.
We also talked about setting up a weekly meeting every Thursday for the planning of NDEW. This will be a meeting to make sure tasks are getting taken care of and we are all on the same page.
We had a visitor join us with questions about getting their very first car – and to get the best deal on an electric one! The advice was to go to cars.com or carvana and search for used EVs with the search terms to get the newest car within your budget to get the most bells and whistles. The battery tech is evolving with every update such as the 2016 Chevy Volt and 2018 Nissan Leaf so that’s important to research. It’s also good to measure your daily drive to see how much range you need to cover your driving habits. A plug in hybrid is always a good choice since it can use gasoline if the battery ever runs out for those that just can’t get over their range anxiety. We can tell you that range anxiety isn’t a real thing since everyone in our club that drives a pure electric car never worries about their range except in very rare cases.
One of our members finally remembered to take a picture of the Tesla Supercharger voltage/electric info label for the actual voltage/amps rating. It’s 410 volts and 270 amps. That’s a lot of juice! No wonder the Superchargers are the fastest chargers out there today.
For the first Sunday of July we decided to meet at the old Moon Hut, now La Fiesta in Cape Canaveral. Since the city has decided to install FREE to use charging stations at City Hall, the Public Library, and Manatee Park, we wanted to take some photos to show them just how much extra business they are bringing into town. This is one of the main ideas every business and apartment/condo owner needs to know. If you install charging stations you will attract more customers. These customers will also end up spending more money at your business/restaurant because they will wait around a little longer than others to wait for their car to charge. This means they might buy an extra coffee or get dessert where other customers would have normally left already. Then, once your competitors are also installing charging stations then you can install FREE to use stations to attract more customers than your competitors. Even if a car was plugged in for 4 hours it would only use about $2 of electricity. So by giving away that $2 you would get back much more than that in extra business. This is way better than the money you would spend for advertising and marketing and get even better results! Once you put your charger on plugshare.com EV drivers will find you and single you out over your competitors – especially if planning a trip and need to stay at your hotel. They will always pick one with a place to charge while they sleep. For more information about charging stations check our info page here.
The other big thing to talk about was to get started on advertising and getting the word out on National Drive Electric Week! Don’t forget to sign up to attend and tell everyone you know to sign up to attend as well. We have almost 100 EVs in our club so it would be awesome if we could break 80 cars this year. Go to our official event page to sign up today!
This month we came back to the bistro/cafe inside the Courtyard by Marriott in Cocoa Beach. We like to show them how much extra business the free charging stations they have in their parking lot attracts by having some of our meetings there. That’s one of the main ideas behind our monthly meetups. Not only do we get to meet any new members and talk electric vehicle tech, we also get to show local businesses the growing number of electric vehicles that are waiting to charge up while parked and spend money at their business. Each month we meet at a different location with charging stations so contact us to get added to the email list or check our upcoming events page. Not only will installing a charging station at your business attract extra EV-driving customers, but it will also increase the time we stay there. This normally turns into extra sales or in the case of a restaurant, a dessert or extra coffee. Read more about the different types of charging stations and reasons to install them at your business on our charging station info page.
We are starting our planning for this year’s National Drive Electric Week event in Satellite Beach so make sure to register to attend or volunteer to help and most of all tell your friends! We are going to try to get well over 50 electric vehicles this year or as close to 100 as possible. We have almost 100 EVs just in our group alone! As of this last meeting, here’s our membership numbers:
