With any project it is always a good idea to get an external opinion periodically as to how you are doing. The time has come for us to do just that. On 16th February we will start process submitting ourselves to scrutiny from Mike Woollacott of Greenwatt Technology consultants http://www.greenwatt.co.uk. Apart from being a bit of an expert on car clubs and electric cars, Mike drives a Nissan Leaf himself. At this first meeting we will be helping him to formulate a survey to go to all members. Although we will be inviting specific members to join us, anyone else is welcome to come and help us. The net results will be laid out at a final open meeting in March or April and presented to Carplus, the car share umbrella organisation http://www.carplus.org.uk, to add to their growing bank of data.
We think it is a success but we will soon find out! If it is a success we will have built it from the demand for the social use of the vehicles, a project we call e-Wheels. So far since the beginning of November last year this has delivered 80 hours of free transport to those unable to afford the cost of getting to appointments and delivering food from Tesco to the food bank in Kineton.
We started our car club with E-Car Club http://www.e-carclub.org in May with a grant from the Department for Transport’s Developing Car Clubs in England fund, managed by Carplus.
At the same time as putting ourselves under scrutiny we seem to have attracted quite a lot of external interest, especially in e-Wheels. The climate change action charity 10:10 http://www.1010uk.org is interested in creating a short film on what we are doing, especially with e-Wheels, for their It’s Happening section. Carplus also seem to like what we are doing (whew!).
