Punching above its weight

Blue Ridge chapter has an impact that belies its small city size

Blue Ridge EV Club event in Waynesville, NC

At the Electric Vehicle Association Annual Meeting in San Diego in January, Blue Ridge Electric Vehicle Club of Asheville, North Carolina was named “Chapter of the Year-South,” and Blue Ridge member Dave Erb was named “EV Charger of the Year.”

“I’m very grateful to the EVA for the award I received, and we’re all especially honored to receive the best chapter distinction,” Erb said, noting that the Asheville chapter launched in 2014 with the hosting of its first National Drive Electric Week (NDEW) event.

“We started off with a bang,” recalled Erb. “Our first two ride & drives, in 2014 and 2015, were the largest NDEW events held in the area west of the Mississippi, south of St. Louis, and north of Florida. And that includes Atlanta, which is 10 times larger than Asheville.”

The reason for the instant success? The chapter scheduled pre-events that stretched for nearly 3 weeks before NDEW began. Often at farmers markets, these gatherings were also held at craft breweries and at autumn celebrations related to the nearby Blue Ridge Parkway.  

“We had Chris Paine movie nights, too,” Erb elaborated. “We screened Who Killed the Electric Car and Revenge of the Electric Car on successive evenings.

“Our Drive Electric Week and Drive Electric Earth Day events are still among the largest in the Southeast,” Erb continued. “And the population of Asheville is just 85,000 people with 300,000 in the surrounding area.”

The right folks 

Erb gave other reasons for the chapter’s success that predate the original NDEW event. 

“The first four reasons for our success were Joe and Lenore Baum, and Rudy and Samantha Beharrysingh,” Erb explained. “They’ve all been incredibly important to building our chapter in terms of inspiration, organizational effort, and effective visioning.” 

Erb listed the fifth important reason for the Blue Ridge EV Club’s success as its home city. 

“Asheville is a very progressive town, much more than any other place I’ve lived,” Erb said. “If you want to have an in-depth discussion about EVs, solar installation, or anything environmental, you don’t need the usual 5-minute pre-conversation. Folks here already know what’s going on with the environment and how EVs fit into the big picture.”

Lightning formula 

Erb is a professor emeritus at University of North Carolina Asheville, where he taught mechatronics engineering. He has been working with electric vehicles (EVs) since 1986, when he was involved with electric and hybrid development in the bus industry.

In the early 1990’s, “I began advising students who were developing EVs and HEVs for contests and races,” Erb explained. Among the contests was “a huge late winter race in Phoenix with a variety of events and classes, including Formula Lightning,” for which he was an advisor to a team from Ohio State.

Erb was an advisor to this team from the University of Idaho, finishing in first place with this Camaro EV conversion.

“When we raced the Lightnings in Cleveland, the organizers had to pay to be on the schedule, but they had money from electric utilities,” Erb explained. “We would compete in front of 65,000 fans on Saturday and the Indy cars would get even bigger crowds on Sunday.  When you go to these events, you can’t count on having accessible energy for battery charging, so we’d bring in generators.”

“Famous racers like Mario Andretti would spend hours with my students,” Erb added. “Of course, the team also took some abuse from fans who would point out the generators and hurl insults about electric cars.”

Later in the 1990’s, Erb built and drove electric race cars himself, including events with the National Electric Drag Racing AssociatIon, EVTC Street Stock and Formula E classes, and Sports Car Club of America Autocross.

Erb in the Porsche 914 EV conversion at EV races in Phoenix in 1998.

Professor Plug-In

When the Blue Ridge EV Club began with the 2014 NDEW event, they started at a downtown site where “my friends set me up at a table to answer technical questions, calling me “Professor Plug-In,” Erb explained. “They were teasing, but I liked the nickname so much that I put it on my business card when I retired.”

“When our first effort was successful, we moved to a big regional mall for the 2015 event,” Erb explained. “In 2016, the mall put us right up in front instead of in back and that’s been a great, mutually beneficial arrangement since then.”

Today, In addition to its NDEW and Drive Electric Earth Day activities, the chapter hosts “Electrify Your Ride,” an annual spring event held at UNC Asheville, and has long advocated for e-bikes, scooters, one-wheels, and other small personal electric transportation modes.

Quick drive from blue to red 

Of late, the Blue Ridge chapter has been establishing outposts in more conservative, surrounding areas. Of course, “When you go to some of the nearby towns, they might call EVs a cult perpetrated by the coastal elites,” Erb said.

The Blue Ridge club will hold two Drive Electric Earth Day events this year, starting with one in Hendersonville, south of Asheville. To date, it has more sign-ups than the Asheville event.

“We try to have a monthly cars and coffee kind of thing in new locations to get things started,” Erb said. “We show up at a parking lot and we’ll shoot the breeze. We usually choose the grocery stores and malls that have installed chargers.”

Last summer, under the leadership of Carlos Ruiz de Quevedo, the chapter took part in a street fair in Hendersonville. “Besides us, it was mostly hot rods that smell a lot more than an EV,” Erb recalled. “Even if you lit an EV on fire you wouldn’t smell as much as these muscle cars.”

Touching all 

“It worked out really well,” Erb continued about the street fair. “One thing about the hot rodders is that a lot of guys build their cars themselves; they’ve spent a lot of time under those cars. So they appreciate the effort that old school EV conversions took. A guy with pictures of his car in hot rod magazines understands.”

With these kind of relationships, Erb has long been spreading the word about EVs to folks who would otherwise be wary of them. He’s also done this by displaying his Nissan LEAF, and then his Chevy Spark and his Model 3, in countless events, as well as giving public presentations and guest lectures about EVs to civic organizations, environmental groups, professional societies, college and high school classes, electric co-ops, and other groups.  Last summer, he drove his Tesla cross country to San Diego.

“It’s been great to have a cause like this,” Erb concluded. “I appreciated the EVA awards, but  bottom line, I love getting the word out and so do my fellow chapter members. It’s all so critical.”