Do You Live in a Green Car City?
The race is on! Some U.S. cities have jumped to the lead in adoption of electrified vehicles. A few of the top 15 are to be expected, and a few others may surprise you.
Forbes recently reported on data compiled by R. L. Polk & Co. showing that sales in 15 U.S. cities accounted for nearly 30% of all plug-in and hybrid vehicles on the road, even though less than 13% of new-vehicle registrations come from those cities. Granted, those figures include both plug-in electric vehicles and gasoline-dependent hybrids, but there were some plug-specific data in there too.
The San Francisco Bay Area (including Oakland and San Jose) and Los Angeles have the two highest concentrations of plug-in vehicle buyers. A quarter of sales of all-electric vehicles take place in these two metropolitan areas, Forbes reports.
As a San Franciscan, I can’t resist saying, Yay! We’re Number One! We’re Number One!
And it makes me wonder if it’s time to start some gamefication of all this to accelerate plug-in vehicle adoption. Could this kind of data be turned into an online game or a smartphone app? Maybe every time an EV or plug-in hybrid gets sold, your city’s “team” gains a point and gets prettier (or more studly, depending on your preference) on the game’s map. Or, every sale of a plug-in vehicle moves your team faster on a virtual race track. The cities with the least plug-in adoption will be falling apart along the road, unable to compete unless they get fixed
And why stop at cities? With Plug In America focusing much of our energy this year on Plug In at Work, maybe Google could compete with Apple and HP and other companies to see which electrifies its corporate fleet fastest, or has the most employees switching to plug-in vehicles?
Here are the cities “winning” so far in the electrification of personal transportation, according to the Polk report and Forbes: San Francisco Bay Area; Los Angeles; Monterey; Santa Barbara; San Diego; Eureka; Chico; Palm Springs and Sacramento, Calif.; Eugene, Portland, Bend and Medford, Ore.; Portland, Wash., and Tucson, Ariz.
Pulling up the rear are cities largely in the clutches of oilandia: Tulsa, Okla.; Lafayette and Lake Charles, La.; Odessa-Midland, Tex.; Glendive, Mont.; Minot-Bismarck, N.D., and Greenwood-Greenville, S.C.
The game is on!
Posted by Sherry
