Please join the NC Clean Energy Technology Center to kick off National Drive Electric Week at NC State University in Raleigh NC with a tailgate and plug-in electric vehicle car show at the NC State versus Clemson football game. For game-day on September 25th, due to the game-day congestion and traffic, if you do not have tickets for the game or parking arrangements, it is not advised that you come to visit the plug-in electric vehicle show.
Location is outside Close King Indoor Practice Facility in the parking lot of Carter Finley Stadium at the corner of West Chase Blvd. and Peter Karmanos Jr. Dr.
Day: Saturday, September 25, 2021
Time: 11:30 am – 3:30 pm EDT
Location: Close King Indoor Practice Facility
Raleigh, NC 27607
Join us to celebrate National Drive Electric Week, as well as Energy Week at NC State University, with an Electric Vehicle Owner Meet-Up/Car Show and Test Drive at Venture Plaza on NC Sate University’s Centennial Campus. Venture Plaza is the open area near the Venture Buildings across from 930 Main Campus Drive. Come learn about and experience electric vehicles. The EV owner’s meet-up will be at the open space across from 930 Main Campus Drive. Non-EVs will have to park in one of the Centennial pay lots. (See: https://centennial.ncsu.edu/visit/) There will be food trucks.
All attendees and volunteers are required to wear face masks whenever they are within six feet of another person at all National Drive Electric Week 2021 events.
Day: Monday, September 27, 2021
Time: 11:00 am – 2:00 pm EDT
Location: Venture Plaza
930 Main Campus Drive
Raleigh, NC 27606
Can’t make it out? Take a video tour of an electric vehicle instead!
The NC Clean Energy Technology Center invites you to join electric vehicle driver Dave Erb for a video tour of his 2015 Chevy Spark EV.
Dave Erb purchased his first EV in 2016, but he worked on projects focused on electric vehicles dating back to 1992. Erb had a long career as an automotive engineer and came from the heavy truck and transit bus industry. He is a retired UNCA Mechatronics Engineering Faculty and also served on the Asheville Transit Committee until he reached term limit.
Erb and his wife own two EVs: a 2015 Chevy Spark EV (Erb’s EV of choice) and a 2019 Tesla Model 3. “They’re polar opposites on the EV spectrum, and each just about perfectly suited for the way we use it,” Erb said. He typically drives 16,000 electric miles per year and his favorite place to charge is at his “beyond net-zero” solar powered home.
The pair made their longest electric road trip in the Tesla. Erb and his wife drove 2,900 miles from Asheville to Minneapolis to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to Ohio and back to Asheville. “We passed (without using) as least as many Tesla Superchargers as we used, and got quite a bit of our charging for no extra cost at the hotels where we stayed,” Erb explained.
“Any sustainable transportation system has to center around electrified powertrains, so I’ve made that my specialty since the mid-1990s. The most notable societal drivers for going electric are noxious emissions (criteria pollutants), energy supply, security and cost, and greenhouse gas emissions. There are also numerous purely automotive reasons to electrify including noise, vibration and harshness, driver feel, packaging flexibility and acceleration performance. By most measures, EVs are just better vehicles, so the decision to drive them kind of makes itself,” Erb noted.