Ecology DFW Style and My Metamorphosis

As you may know, I sell cars. It’s a relatively new endeavor for me and it’s my Volt that brought me to this point in life (both metaphorically and literally). I want to help move people to plug-in electric vehicles so they can experience the joy I have driving mine and to make the world a little bit cleaner car by car.

Does that mean I only sell Volts? Of course not. I’d starve or have to find a new career. That being said, I have had customers tell me that as I described various vehicle that would fit their needs, when I started telling them about the Volt:

• “You seem so passionate about the Volt.”
• “You really came alive when you started talking about the Volt!”
• “You sold me on the Volt! I want it!”

My job at Classic Chevrolet is allowing me to spread the word, one sales opportunity at a time. Last year, I got to set up a test drive event at Coppell High School’s “Engineering Tech Day.” In that setting, I had a steady flow of people who wanted to check out (and ask questions) about the Volt.

I also was invited to attend a North Texas Council of Governments meeting on how to speed up adoption of EVs. They were actually interested in my input.

Coming up soon, I will be exhibiting at the Texas AltCar Expo, March 27th-29th, 2014 in the Irving Convention Center. Classic Chevrolet will have a booth on the show floor, with a Volt on hand, where people can learn about the Volt and Classic Chevrolet’s “Green Fuels Station,” where we sell compressed natural gas, E85, and perhaps one day, electricity for plug-ins. We will also have a test drive Volt outside so we can get “butts in seats” to show people exactly how great the Volt is. This will be my second time to attend this event. Last year, I attended as a blogger and was on the outside looking in. (you may remember my video on the Bat Prius…)

Shortly after AltCar, the City of Grapevine, Texas will be having an Eco Festival. (more info on this soon) Once again, Classic Chevrolet will have a Volt on display and a Volt test drive. I have volunteered to publicly speak about my experiences with the Volt, to further spread the word about the economic and environmental benefits of plug-in vehicles. Notice I placed the word “economic” before “environmental” in that last sentence? That was entirely intentional. My experience in a sales role Green Mountain Energy taught me a painful lesson. That lesson being that most Americans do not care about the environment. They care about their pocketbooks. This was brought up recently, in an article on the Green Car Reports website. The article was about how dealerships, who want to get people into plug-in vehicles, should focus on the economic benefits first. This really resonated with me, Not just because of my Green Mountain Energy sales experience, but because it is what first attracted me to the Volt.

Like many people, I have always considered myself ecologically-minded. When hiking in national parks, I would pick up other people’s trash, bag it and carry it back to the nearest trash can. It angered me that people did this and I truly could not understand how someone could hike miles into the back country to see the beauty and leave their trash there. Most of the photographs I show in my 20’s and 30’s were landscapes, taken in pristine areas. (This was a mistake I’ve now realized. Take photos of your loved ones. They’re the ones you’ll cherish most later.)

I talked the talk but didn’t walk the walk.

I drove a Ford Expedition (a friend called it the “Extinction,” due to it’s size and gas mileage). In my defense, I bought it shortly after the birth of my last daughter, thinking its massive size would protect her) I didn’t invest much money in making our various homes more energy efficient, I spent on cosmetic updates. I was a “Granny Smith environmentalist.” (green on the outside only…)

When I bought my Volt, I was looking for an inexpensive replacement for my Lexus ES300 which had been totaled by a texting driver. I wasn’t attracted by the “greenness” of the Volt. (well, I was a little…) I was attracted by the low total cost of ownership. I had no money budgeted for a new vehicle as I had expected another two or three years of service from my ES. Then an odd thing happened. It started as a curiosity, then a math problem (which is how I always try to deal with uncertainty), and finally, over three months after I leased my Volt, I wrote my first post about the environment.

My Volt changed me.

Many of you with plug-in vehicles know exactly what I mean. The fact that these vehicles are so affordable, or that we can fuel them at home instead of driving to this thing called a “service station” (now that’s an oxymoron!), or that they’re so much fun to drive got us talking obsessively with friends, acquaintances, heck even strangers about our EVs. But they also got us to start reading. Yes, we read about others who felt like we did about our vehicles, but in doing so, we found article after article about global climate change, politics surrounding any discussion of EVs or the environment, pollution, and more.

Then we became crusaders (for my Muslim friends, I do not mean this in the historical sense, but the word “zealot” seems a bit much). We started getting into arguments with friends, family members and strangers about the environment and the dangers the Earth is facing. We perhaps even lost some friends over this issue, but we gained new friends who are concerned about the world we’re leaving for our children and the generations that follow them.

Maybe the word “zealot” isn’t a bit much after all…

• I started this blog to tell everyone about how cool plug-in vehicles are.
• We leased a second Volt and cannot foresee ever going back to a non-plug-in vehicle.
• I was interviewed on a radio program about my experiences with my Volt.
• I was sought out by and competed in The EV Challenge.
• I traveled across the country to attend the Chicago Auto Show on their “media day” and did the same at the Fort Worth Auto Show (without the traveling…)
• I changed careers to promote clean energy.
• I changed careers again to promote plug-in vehicles!
• Some of my posts have been reprinted by The Electric Generation and Inside EVs.
• I was invited to speak before a local government group about how they can help promote EVs.
• We sold our home and built a smaller, much more efficient one. I downsized for the first time in my life. I had always been taught that you keep buying bigger and nicer homes, climbing that ladder of success.
• We investigated solar panels and signed a contract to have them added to our home. We’ve hit some snags on this, but plan to resort to lawyers to exert our freedom, if necessary.

The lesson in all this, is that people who adopt the plug-in lifestyle, do so for varied reasons. Some are absolutely focused on the environmental impact from the beginning. However, for those of us who didn’t have that as our primary concern, most of us move into the tree-hugging category pretty quickly (and vehemently). I’ve never experienced any change in my life quite like the one brought about by my Volt.

This has been a strange blog post for me. It started as an announcement about the two events I’m going to be at, presenting the Volt. I was then planning to discuss how these events will cut into my sales time which, for a commissioned salesperson, is a pretty big investment and sacrifice. As I pondered this sacrifice, I started asking myself why I would give up the opportunity to make sales (and the corresponding income) to do this. Then, it quickly morphed into a post about my electric vehicle journey, which, oddly enough, is the name of this blog.