National Drive Electric Week 2014 DFW: A look back

I was exhausted after National Drive Electric Week. I had worked “bell-to-bell” at my dealership that week, meaning that I was there every hour we were open, except for leaving for meals and picking up my new iPhone early Friday morning. I had wondered how an entire week dedicated to EV awareness would turn out. Here’s the bottom line:

• More people came to the dealership or called, specifically looking for EV information.
• We did not sell a single Chevy Volt during the week, although several customers came close to pulling the trigger.

Was the week a complete flop? In my opinion, it was not because it offered lessons from which we can learn:

Lesson 1: Organizers have got to start planning earlier. Much earlier. As we kicked around ideas in the DFW area (and we had some great ones) we discovered that the really exciting things we wanted to do could not be set up in time. Specifically, having the event in a park or large stadium parking lot, required coordinating with city government to reserve a spot and police help with directing traffic and setting up a ride & drive area. Getting live music meant finding and networking with local musicians who would donate their talents to the cause. Getting vendors to attend (i.e. electricity providers, solar panel companies, food vendors, etc) would require much earlier scheduling to avoid conflicts with their calendars.

Lesson 2: A better understanding of each group’s motivations and goals is needed. Everyone involved wanted to see increased adoption of electric vehicles. However, EV enthusiasts want to also see their group’s membership (and prominence) increased. Dealerships want to see EV sales and/or dealership traffic increased (without much effort or cost). These things don’t have to be exclusive of one another, but there has to be a frank discussion of goals and there has to be a leader to coordinate efforts to everyone’s benefit.

Lesson 3: The chronological order of events is important. Having the big “meet up” at the end of the week means dealerships don’t benefit from the focus on EVs, until after NDEW has ended. Saturdays are very big sales days at car dealerships and they are reluctant to do anything that might interfere with sales on that day. In my opinion, having National Drive Electric Week begin on a Monday was a major mistake. That makes Sunday, the only day where motivated dealership personnel could attend an event (and bring cars for the public to try), the final day of the celebration with no way to leverage that momentum during NDEW.

Lesson 4: Due to tight profit margins, a long educational sale cycle for EVs and conflicting events (like truck month), dealership participation is muted or nonexistent. I heard from other EV enthusiasts, working for car dealerships, complain that there was no buy-in from upper management. Consequently there was no advertising or promotion of the event included in the weekly advertising cycle of area dealerships. Although there are pockets of cooperation within dealerships (like an excellent effort put forth by the Service Managers at Classic Chevrolet to make a huge Service bay available for EVers), there is largely indifference from other departments and sales personnel.

Lesson 5: As a friend of mine, Charlie Hodges, who runs a public relations firm said, those setting up the event need “to engage a media relations expert with a record and knowledge to attract news coverage. No one knew of these events cause they got -0- media attention.” There are professional who do this sort of thing. Some of them may be EV enthusiasts that, like the rest of us, would donate their time and effort to making NDEW a success. Those of us pushing the movement forward have to understand that there are others who have skills we do not. We have to involve them in the early planning so the event benefits from their area of expertise.

Lesson 6: We need to learn from the success of others. Several NDEW events across the country we far more successful than ours in the Dallas / Fort Worth area. We need to reach out to the organizers of those successful events and learn what they have already learned. Specifically, the event in Austin seems to have been a huge success, even though both last year and this year it rained on their major event day. They had live music, food vendors and others. Time for a pow-wow!

Now that the lessons have been enumerated, let’s move on to what I observed.

The salesperson who sits next to me had a great suggestion. He said I should attach a Volt charger to a display we have, touting a free year of charging. That display would be positioned next to a Volt, in the showroom, with the charge cord inserted into the Volt. What a GREAT idea! Why had this not occurred to me before? (have I mentioned I’m not a promotions expert?) This one change at our dealership started more Volt conversations than any other display I’ve put up in the year I’ve been there! Sheer brilliance! Many thanks to my friend, Steve Thomas, for this bit of advice.

EV newbies definitely are as enthusiastic as I was, when it was all new to me. Even better, EV oldies (like me) are still very enthusiastic about their vehicles, and look forward to every opportunity to share what they’re learned with anyone interested (and even some who aren’t…). Also, I found that some of the owners can make your dream come true. For example, I made a new friend on Saturday named Scotty. He joined a small caravan of EVs that came to our dealership to speak with anyone interested. I told Scotty I had started getting interested in EVs by reading about the Tesla Roadster before production started and had lusted over them ever since. He was kind enough to offer me a test drive in the EV of my dreams. He even put it in performance mode so I could get the full experience! Zero to sixty in 3.9 seconds. WHAT A RUSH THAT WAS! Thank you, Scotty.

P.S. More photos will be posted soon. For now, I’ve got to stop blogging and go to work!