Chapter Leadership Highlights: KEVA
Introduction
For Drive Electric Tennessee Month in July, Knoxville Electric Vehicle Association President Eric Cardwell was interviewed. KEVA has been operating in the greater Knoxville area for over a decade and is the core group that holds Ride & Drives in Knoxville and the surrounding counties. They also have been growing over the last few years and are currently the strongest group of EV owners in Tennessee that works on educating others! The chapter holds numerous events every year, including Drive Electric Earth Month and National Drive Electric Week.
Eric- Knoxville Electric Vehicle Association President
Q: What EV do you drive?
A: The only thing available in the area was a used 2013 Chevy Volt. That was two years off lease with 32,000 miles, so I grabbed that and have been milking it ever since. I work from home, so I have only added about 56k miles this whole time. It still runs great, and I have had no problems out of it. Chevy really over engineered the Volt. But I am currently looking to upgrade to a full BEV sometime soon.
Q: What made you decide to be a chapter leader?
A: I got started with EVA way back in 2007 when I was working in the DC area. I was very active in the group and that’s when we basically only had conversions to show off. By 2011, I was voted in as Vice President of the DC chapter until I left to come back to Knoxville in 2014 since my DC job let me work from home. When I was back in Knoxville I was surprised to find we had a nice little chapter that had started up in 2009. We had a core group of about 10 individuals that would always show up to meetings. We also had 3 or 4 conversions that our members had completed and were driving.
I just took a backseat for the first couple of years and watched and made some slight suggestions and helped them grow where I thought we could grow. It wasn’t till after I came back from a year long stint in Denver in 2017 that I was asked by members to step up and direct the group as president. It was a natural fit because I love supporting EV adoption with all my heart and soul and would probably be involved in everything we did anyways so I might as well step up and help out by being the leader the group needed. I am very happy to serve as the president of the Knoxville Electric Vehicle Association.
Q: How long have you driven an EV?
A: At college at the University of Tennessee, where I was studying electrical engineering, I was involved in a class called Future Truck in 2003. We were given a Ford Explorer and tasked with turning it into a hybrid vehicle and then competing with 15 other top universities. That opportunity really turned me on to PHEVs and EVs. When I got a job in DC out of college, I started looking for EV enthusiast groups so I could help with conversions and get my hands dirty…I found the Greater Washington Electric Vehicle Association that was established in 1980…My parked car was crushed by another vehicle, so I went carless for 8 years during my time in DC since they have such great public transit.
But even carless I was still helping EVADC with EV conversions and events. Then I bought my Volt in 2014, but I like to say I have been driving EVs since 2007 since I helped put so many on the roads! Back then I actually ran an EV blog called Sofastithertz.com (long since defunct) but I cataloged a lot of the EV movement back in those early days.
Q: What changes have you experienced since switching to driving an EV?
A: Well I can avoid gasoline completely if I want. Even the Volt has pretty fast acceleration that makes it a blast to drive. I loved driving up Pikes Peak in Colorado, having 1 mile of range at the top, and then having a full battery by the time I got back down to the bottom! Since my Volt is a PHEV, there always was a backup for me. I still have to say the CON would be charging station availability. We are working on it, but we can always use more so that we don’t really have to think about it when we want to take longer trips.
Q: What is the longest trip you have taken in your EV? What were the starting and ending cities of that trip?
A: My Volt is a PHEV so I ran on gasoline for a majority of my longest trip, but I was able to save and use my EV range when it was most efficient to use it, so I would save my battery until I was in stop and go traffic. My longest trip was in January of 2016, I got a temporary promotion out in Denver Colorado, so I packed up EVERYTHING into the trunk of my VOLT and drove out to Denver. I picked an apartment complex in downtown Denver specifically because it had EV charging! While living in Denver, the Volt did 4 trips up Mount Evans, 2 trips up Pikes Peak, multiple trips to ski resorts on interstate 70, and then back to Knoxville in early 2018. That was a heck of a journey for the Volt. It handled it all perfectly!
Q: What do you wish you had known prior to purchasing your first EV?
A: Having been involved with EVs for as long as I have, I can’t say there was something I didn’t know. I knew what was involved and I was more shocked that it lived up to my expectations! It didn’t let me down.
Q: What question are you asked most at Chapter events/meetings about EVs?
A: I guess it would be the question of “when are we getting more charging stations?”
There are a lot of routes through the southern states that need more DC Fast Charging so EVs can easily access these areas of the states. There has been a lot of government money that has become available for charging infrastructure expansion in the past couple of years with the Infrastructure Bill that congress passed. I tell people that these plans are moving slowly, but that they will see the fruits of the labors shortly when a lot of these chargers come online in the next few months.
Thank You KEVA!
Thank you to Eric Cardwell for agreeing to this interview, and thank you to KEVA members and partners for your work. We appreciate all the effort this chapter gives to support a more electrified Tennessee!
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