Driving Electric .org - new community website for electric vehicle adoption launching soon

If it isn't saturated with advertising like this site, doesn't take forever to load like this site, and doesn't use the worst captcha login version on the Web like this site, I'll be there.

That post, BTW, took three minutes to go through.

"It only takes about 15 minutes to create a profile about you and your car."
So that new site is only open to plug-in elctric car drivers, or also for for plug-in elctric motorcylce riders?

Not only are they not going to let us Dirty Little Scooter People in, they actually deleted the profile I created there, with a photo of the ZEV and a bunch of stuff I'd already added - all without contacting me or even bothering to reply to the email I'd sent about a site glitch. So here is my review of their site, as posted at an online salon:

In an apparent attempt to personify the slurs the Right makes
against EV owners, a new website has come into being:
http://www.drivingelectric.org

The site supposedly exists to connect people who may want to get an
EV (or PEV, as they call them) with people who already own them. Of
course, to them, "electric vehicle" means "electric car" and the
pricier the better! Having just purged the site of all two-wheeled EV
owners during beta testing, they are now trying to prime the pump with
topics about how delightful the $40k Leaf and $80-100k Tesla are. They
do have an Affirmative Action program, though: owners of electric
conversion cars can join, as long as they don't get the place too
dirty. In short, they have eliminated the bottom 90% of EV owners from
their little club, and now are going to sit back and wonder where all
the site traffic is. Please believe me when I say that these elitist
jackasses don't represent typical EV owners.

Thanks, David,for the reply.

Leftie, I am sorry for the mixup. Our response below may not make you happy, but it's what we've got for now. We recognize that there is so much energy in the electric motorcycle community that we want to include all highway-capable motorcycles ASAP. (We haven't decided what to do about other 2-wheel vehicles.) And we love conversions, as dirty as they want to be. (I helped get the Prius open-source conversions going, and drove one for 5 years.)

We are a tiny group of mostly volunteers, and have not responded personally to all emails. Please re-send your email about a site glitch to support@.

There are two issues here: your account, and our policy on motorcycles. This is from our "Known Issues" page http://www.drivingelectric.org/known-issues

Q. I can't find my Driver account. Was I deleted? A. We have not intentionally deleted any users. Some registrants who did not respond to the original registration email to validate their accounts may be deleted after 48 hours. We wrote users to remind everyone to do this, and tune up their profiles, but some may have missed that email. We are working to reinstate any who registered and were deleted.

And
We are starting with highway-capable four-wheel vehicles, We hope in the future to add motorcycles, Citycars, Neighborhood Electric Vehicles, and other 3 and 2-wheelers, since they're all of course part of the plug-in story. You can already list a conversion and describe other vehicles in "My EV story."
(After we put that explanation up, we saw that Brammo and Vectrix are on list, Zero isn't. We didn't remove them.)

We'd love to get a group of electric motorcycle enthusiasts working with us to be sure we include your community the way you want it, and so you can use DrivingElectric (when we enable search by vehicle type) to bring together EV-curious people with drivers of electric motorcycles.

Thanks, Felix

Thanks Felix for at least a statement concerning our beloved (and sometimes cursed...) electric plug in 2-wheelers. They are the no.1 inroads to the drive towards electric vehicles, so it does surprise me a bit that your inital focus is only on electric cars, leaving out the 2-wheeled pioneers and trailblazers so-to-speak.

You're right that for a long time, the tens (hundreds) of millions of electric two-wheelers around the world will have a greater impact globally on petroleum use and greenhouse gas emissions than the small number of full-sized electric vehicles now coming to market.

I've been focusing on cars (in fact, at CalCars.org, mostly in plug-in hybrids) for 10 years, but now drive a BEV and a PHEV). As you may know, our other two sponsors, Electric Auto Association and Plug In America, have been promoting both, and their efforts were critical to getting federal tax credits for 2- and 3- wheel plug-ins. Let's figure out what we can do together ASAP!

The reason that some users - and I'm guessing they were mostly or even all two-wheeled EV owners like me - didn't reply to the confirmation was that it was never sent. Nor was it resent when that option was tried. I'd be more inclined to blame a software glitch if the beta site didn't say, IIRC, that accounts would be 'reviewed'. You folks can backpedal all you want now, but you've probably shot yourself in the foot before even leaving the starting block. Instead of getting serious adults with two-wheeled EVs, you'll get 13 year olds (yes, that's the minimum age for membership, as long as you don't say you have a scooter or motorcycle) with golf carts sporting flames. I for one have better things to do than look at photos of Leafs (Leaves?) and Teslas, and read about one man's concern about what his wife would be wearing when they drive their new Corvette, er, Tesla.

BTW, it looks like I've been using EVs longer than most of the people behind this site.

If you're wondering why there are no replies in your topic about my criticism, David, it's apparently because they aren't being approved by whoever moderates the forum at drivingexpensive. I submitted a perfectly polite, if critical comment and it never showed up. I invite the folks here to try it themselves: ask why the site isn't allowing 2 wheeled EVs, say something critical (but polite! Don't give them an easy excuse) and see if it gets posted. The url is http://drivingelectric.org/scope-driving-electric-cars-only-motorcycles-bicycles

Thanks for the response, and for approving the post. I don't understand, though, how a site that seems to want people to post in its forums, and requires pre-approval of posts, can be set up so that there is no easy way to see posts waiting for approval. Yikes.

Um, I just went and looked, and it looks like you approved *all* the posts, spam included. Some of them I don't even understand.