We bring you a quick excerpt from a talk at National Plug In Day in San Franciso by a Nissan Executive confirming what we've been saying: that plug-in drivers are the best people to inspire others to buy PEVs, and CalCars & DrivingElectric founder Felix Kramer's speech on launching DrivingElectric. Links for both to videos so you can choose to watch or read.

http://drivingelectric.org/­blogs/­felixkramer/­nissan-executive-confirms-it-pev-drivers-help-sell-cars Nissan executive confirms it: PEV drivers help sell cars: "more of our sales come from youu guys than come forom our sales and marketing efforts"

At National Plug In Day in San Francisco, Brendan Jones, Director of Nissan LEAF Marketing & Sales Strategy, talked for 6 minutes and 40 seconds. He spent 2 of those minutes confirming what PEV advocates have been saying for a while, and drivers have been discovering. After describing his own credentials, he talked about the spirit of the driver community, their impact on sales, the way the help dealers, and the guidance they provide to the company, directly and unequivocally, in a way we can only celebrate and pass along. Though he works at Nissan, he intentionally broadened his remarks to include all PEV drivers and all vehicles.

We hope everyone in the industry will be inspired by this, and, down the road, we look for manufacturers, suppliers, and dealers to recognize the value of DrivingElectric as we help the "EV-curious" become buyers. Watch the video at http://youtu.be/­Hkey12m0xhg and we've posted it at DrivingElectric's Gallery http://drivingelectric.org/­galleries/­felixkramer/­nissan-exec-confirms-pev-drivers-sell-cars ; below you can read our transcript of "the good parts." Then share it on social media and by email! (Thanks to Gint Federas for capturing the event on video; others from the event at http://www.youtube.com/­gfederas -- and tune in again here soon for more about another one.)

(PIcking up at 2:50 in the video:)

"I started three years ago on the project. And I'm -- I don't know if you can tell by looking at me. I'm just a traditional car guy. I fell in love with cars some time before I went into my undergrad program, fell in love with them through grad school, and I've stayed in the business for over 25 years, 18 of the years with Nissan. I love cars.

But I will tell you after 25 years of experience in the business, I've never found this much energy, enthusiasm, entrepreneurial spirit and emotion surrounding one vehicle as I have with the Nissan Leaf and all electric vehicles in general. There's more excitement and passion about changing the way we move, about doing something for the environment, about getting the country off foreign oil, etc., than there is around the EV movement. It's something different. And it's the first time people can own a car and actually feel good about what they're doing with it, and that's outstanding.

And when you hear that enthusiasm coming from the public it can't help but rub off. And what I mean by that is more of our sales come from you guys than come from our sales and marketing efforts. And for that again I have to thank you, because when you go into a parking lot, or you drive through your neighborhood, and you talk about the vehicle with so much enthusiasm and passion, that just helps to sell cars. It makes my job very very easy.

And also it makes my job very easy to listen to your stories with the passion. Even the constructive criticism, because I'll tell you, you guys give the best constructive criticism of any group I've had to be associated with. And I can tell you, it's listened to at the highest levels of the company. You guys are more important than me. And that's the way it should be."

http://drivingelectric.org/­blogs/­felixkramer/­why-weve-launched-drivingelectric-des-founder Why we've launched DrivingElectric: from DE's founder 6-minute video or transcript: Felix Kramer tells the story

NOTE BEFORE BLOG POSTING: We explain why we need a way to connect drivers and EV-curious people. The photo shows some of the team at National Plug In Day, holdling the mini-flyers http://drivingelectric.org/­resources we've made available for anyone to download, print, and keep in their cars or hand out at events: Howard Clearfield, Rachel Schapira, Felix Kramer, Marc Geller, Ben Jones; also see the photo/video gallery "Speech at launch of DrivingElectric" for more pictures and watch video of the speech without leaving our site. Thanks to Michael Bender for the transcript (edited for readability).

ANNOUNCING THE LAUNCH OF DRIVINGELECTRIC AT THE CRISSY FIELD, SAN
FRANCISCO EVENT OF NATIONAL PLUG IN DAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2012.

Introduction by Marc Geller, event MC, co-Founder of Plug In America, DrivingElectric advisor:

Our job is not done when we purchase or lease our cars. And Felix Kramer, who most of you will know from CalCars, is launching, with the Electric Auto Association and Plug in America, a new effort to connect drivers with the folks who need to know how awesome these cars are, what they do for us, how convenient they are. Felix -- tell them about DrivingElectric!

[Felix trips on the way to the podium, recovers, picks up his papers]

See video (starting after the fall, and missing the last minute that's transcribed below) at YouTube http://www.youtube.com/­watch?v=PdcBAdJ_EYI&feature=plcp .

Every start-up stumbles. [laughter]

I want to tell a couple of stories. We all have EVs in our past -- for me, I remember bumper cars at amusement parks, and toy electric cars. And we've become very comfortable plugging everything in! It's not anything weird or new anymore.

So I first drove in a plugin hybrid -- Andy Frank, at the UC-Davis invented them -- and I got inspired about that. Then I drove Marc's RAV4 EV and I just realized how great plug-in cars were. I had seen the EV1 when it showed up but I kind of passed it by -- I didn't really understand all that. I was a little later to the game than some of other people. But then, at CalCars we started converting Priuses, and you remember this probably, some of you [holding the yellow "dongle," which connects the retrofit to a regular 120 socket] -- this is the most powerful plug we can imagine -- it helped get car makers to build the Chevy Volt, the Prius Plug-in and other plug-in hybrids.

Every single one of those cars I drove was memorable. What happened with every one, when I got in them -- and this is an experience you've probably had, too -- you get in the car, you close the door, and it's solid, and you sit in there and you say, "This is a real car!" It's not a golf cart, it's not some weird kind of thing. And you can't get that until you actually sit in the car and drive in the car. And you don't just say this is a regular car, you say it's better than a regular car!

So everybody's talked about the "EV grin". We all know about the EV grin. Everybody gets the EV grin when they drive in the cars. So now, my family has a Volt and a Leaf, and I feel punished when I can't drive electric. I feel like I'm in jail somewhere if I have to drive another kind of car.

And you know, it's not just about the cars, it's not just about how great they are, it's about this t-shirt ["petrocide" -- a stick figure next to a fuel pump blowa his brains out with a gasoline nozzle], which is what Ed [Eddie Sher, Senior Communications Strategist, Sierra Club's Beyond Oil campaign] talked about too. It's about fossil fuels destroying our world, and we have to get off fossil fuels. And these cars are a way to get there, and there's nothing more important in the world than for all of us to find some way to get the world off of fossil fuels [applause]. Thank you. Sometimes we forget about it and it's such a big deal that we don't want to think about it, but it's out there.

So a funny thing happened in the last year, the last couple of years especially. I discovered that I was selling cars. I never realized that I was going to be a car salesman, but people said, "because of you, because of CalCars, because of other people showing us plug-in cars, I bought a car!" And I thought, Isn't that great? At the same time, I saw the carmakers building really wonderful cars, but in my opinion and a lot of other people, falling very short in marketing and selling the cars. And we could help them, I realized. We can help the dealers, we can help the automakers.

And if we do that we help insure the success of these cars, which is not guaranteed, because the $7,500 tax credit -- it's not a sure thing that's always going to be there. And if that goes away quickly, these cars could be in trouble. We have to build demand for these cars.

I have seen so many drivers enthusiastically, unselfishly, having so much fun showing their cars! So we came up with a new idea; we came up with the idea of DrivingElectric. And it's really like mixing up the Electric Auto Association, Plug in America and CalCars with Meetup.com and Match.com. It's basically connecting everybody, that's the whole idea.

So, starting today, what we are doing is we are enabling a site where you, the drivers, can sign up, make a profile, upload pictures of your car, tell stories -- it's getting better, it's very preliminary so far -- it's stumbling a little bit too. You'll see when you go to the site: some things don't work that well but we're getting there. But what is going to happen is that anyone in the country who hears about it, and they're going to hear about it by these little flyers you can download and print out -- I have some here -- you can have them in the dashboard of your car or the side of your car, so when somebody says, "What's that?" you can give them this.

People will be able to find a map on our website, and they can drill down in that map and they can find someone near them who has a plug-in car and is willing to do something for them: talk to them, give them a test ride, a test drive, maybe lend them the car or swap cars for a couple of hours. And I hope, among you drivers, you all are going to make a resolution: that this year one of my goals is to take one person I find, one person who is interested, and not just show them the car and talk to them about it, but go through the whole way and get them into a dealer and get them to buy a car.

And at that point, you will have succeeded that year in taking... [there are] 50,000 electric drivers and if every one of those 50,000 drivers gets one person to buy a car, then we will have doubled the demand, in addition to all the other reasons people are buying these cars.

So we want this service to be your tool. We want it for all drivers who love showing off their cars. And I resolve -- that's personally, myself -- to sell as many as I can.

So where are we in DrivingElectric.org? Right now we have people in 34 states and four Canadian provinces, and you can see it on the map. And so, we're getting started, it's going to build, but we want everybody to know about it, we want it to be a tool that all of our sponsoring organizations are involved in, and we are going to get a lot of other partners. We have PlugShare as a great first partner as well.

And so that's what we're doing -- DrivingElectric.org and I just want to thank some of the people on the team are here, and some not: Rachel Schapira Ben Jones, Deborah Wong, Marc Geller and Howard Clearfield helped a lot [applause throughout]. And not here in various parts of the country: Chi Ly Kim, David Herron, Michael Bender, Josh Kaplan, Ron Knox [see team at About Us]. So thank you. This has been a labor of love, and we're getting there.

(Thanks to Gint Federas; see his other videos from the event http://www.youtube.com/­gfederas and his photos http://www.youtube.com/­gfederas.)