GE Reports

Tired of reading about all those tantalizing new EVs, and watching other folks test drive them on TV? GE’s EV Experience Tour is coming to town, bringing hands-on EV experience and face-to face interactions with EV engineers to anyone who wants it. Each tour stop features a one-day educational forum co-hosted by GE and its local EV partners, including GM, Ford, Toyota, Navistar, Smith Electric Vehicles, Mitsubishi, Coda, Smart, THINK and other organizations on the tour. Its purpose is to get businesses and infrastructure specialists better acquainted with EVs and their charging systems.

Participants will be able to speak with GE experts, discuss the business case for EV ecosystems, join live forums on various topics in the EV field, and, yes, take an EV for a test drive. The tour is part of GE’s plan to build partnerships with a variety of stakeholders in the emerging world of EVs, including electrical distributors and contractors, builders, fleet managers, universities, and city and state officials.

The forums themselves are split into two workshop tracks — technical and business. The tech track will cover vehicle features and specs, and address the process of integrating EV infrastructure into homes and commercial facilities. The business track will speak to the case for EV ecosystems, and cover development of EV strategies.

The tour begins in San Francisco, a natural venue for showing off the versatility of the newest EV’s, with its famous hills, coastline drives, and a combination of city streets and multi-lane freeways, bridges, and tunnels.

But there are other factors that make San Francisco a supportive environment for early adoption of electric transportation. From an environmental perspective, the transportation sector accounts for more than 50 percent of air pollution in the Bay Area. And both San Francisco and the state of California have been supportive of EVs, creating alliances such as The California Plug-In Electric Vehicle (PEV) Collaborative, a public/private hybrid organization that includes utilities, automakers, infrastructure providers, public officials, and environmental organizations. Their plan, Taking Charge: Establishing California Leadership in the Plug-In Electric Vehicle Marketplace, hopes to facilitate PEV market growth such that “hundreds of thousands of PEVs are sold annually in California.”

Here are the dates for the Tour’s first four cities:

We’ll be checking in with the next few cities here on GEReports. More information, including times and specific locations is available here.

GE’s WattStation EV charger is seen above.