The Wall Street Journal Features Me in a Series about Electric Cars

The chart above is a representation of an entire day in my life driving the MINI-E. Mike Ramsey from the Wall Street Journal contacted me a while ago and told me he was doing a series on electric cars. He said it was his intention to show all sides to EV's; the positives and the negatives and he wanted to talk to people that had both points of view. He asked me if I felt OK with being chosen to represent the pro-EV side.

That both a great feeling and a little scary. I have been in the news quite a bit lately but this was still a great honor since the Wall Street Journal is such well respected paper with world wide distribution and out of all the electric car advocates there are, Mike sought me out to be the example of how and why people do like electric cars.

Since Mike writes out of Detroit, we did the interviews over the phone and even a little through email. He had the Journal send a photographer to my house one day at about 9:00am and spent the entire day with me. He left his car in my driveway and came with me to work and drove around with me anytime I used the car, finally returning home with me at 10:00 at night. The purpose of this was to take pictures and record my use of the car for one entire day. They wanted to show the state of charge the car had, the miles, my average speed and outside temperature to make the graphic posted above. If you click the link below to the complete article you can enlarge the graph and see additional information.

The series of articles in the Journal did have more of an anti-EV slant, with Mike concentrating more on the roadblocks and issues that EV's may have than the positives. I'm a little disappointed that he didn't print more of what we talked about because I think a defended electric cars admirably and offered reasons why people are going to embrace them instead of focusing on their shortcomings. We talked about how the early cell phones were so expensive, had terrible range and were huge and cumbersome but somehow, despite the problems of the early models they prevailed and are now a part of just about everyone's life.

I got a lot of emails after the article ran and a couple "well done" messages from a few electric car advocates. You never know how an article will be written when you give an interview. Although I would have like to see a little more about the reasons I gave for why I think EV's will be a success, overall I think Mike was fair and didn't misrepresent anything we discussed. You can read the whole article by clicking on this link.