Everyone,
I was asked last night what my goals would be for the club, and here is my answer. It will no doubt evolve as we move through time.
Every meeting should be at least partially focused on building, modifying, fixing, charging infra for, or learning about the operation of EV's. (the December meeting is an exception, although I bet you will still learn something)
As the fleet continues to age we are seeing more out of warranty cars, and I want to work to keep those cars alive and driving around. We continue to add EV's and presently the older Leafs are quite popular so I am looking for suggestions for fixes, mods, or improvements that our members could benefit from, and depending on the complexity, start having meetings where we do the mod to the cars. If the mod is more complex it will move to a work session format. Finding locations for these sorts of things can get interesting, so that is one of our challenges. I think we can make this happen though.
On the conversion side of the house, I want to see updates and work sessions supporting that fleet of vehicles. Due to the complexity those work sessions don't often fit well with the format of a Friday night meeting but I want to see those cars stay on the road and useful.
As I mentioned last night, I will be delegating each meeting to one the experts in our club, and asking them to be the Chairman of that meeting. This is still a new concept for the club and it may mutate as we learn how it works and how it doesn't.
Upcoming meetings, and their Chairman:
October, me, on charging Infra
November, Bruce, currently planned category is conversions
December, Marty, PARTY!
What I ask of all of the members is to go through your knowledge, forums, and documentation and find those nuggets of information that you think we would like to know about. If you want to present it yourself, we will help you, if you want to feed the data to someone else to present, that is fine too. Things I always want to know and frequently get asked. What things go wrong with car X, and how much do they cost to fix. How do I detect those common problems on a car I am thinking about buying? How long will it last? Can I fix those common problems myself, and information on that. Reducing total cost of ownership is a goal that seems to be pretty common to everyone in the club, and this information is vital to buying cars that fit that goal.
Most of these answers are already out there buried in the various forums dedicated to our cars. We just need to pull that data out, consolidate it (archive it against loss) and make it more useful to our members and the public. From there we should be able to develop the in club expertise and supply chain to execute those procedures easily and cost effectively.
For conversions we already have substantial in house expertise, we get new people visiting looking for information on conversions, and we need to help them as much as we can. I am not suggesting we are lacking in this regard, but the one thing that we might be able to offer is a mentor process. When someone comes to a meeting and is considering a conversion, we could assign a couple of people to that person to help them through the initial thought process. They would have discussions outside of meetings and likely look at the project and provide guidance on it before money gets spent. As the project moves along different people may take over mentoring or be added to the team until the whole club is involved at major work sessions. As we all know many conversion projects end up unfinished (just ask my wife). Instead let's channel our collective expertise into these excited new people and see if we can guide them down the path and help them avoid an expensive door stop, and instead have an awesome drive-able car. In some cases, help them find a production EV that meets their needs at a fraction of the cost of a conversion. Please let us know in this thread if you would like to mentor people on conversions.
Reach out in this thread or start a new one if you have ideas / volunteer about any of the above topics. If you don't like posting to the forums, then speak to me at a meeting or reach out in some other way.
