Yahoo Autos Electrify Expo is an all-electrified auto show like the old days
In late July, Autoblog swung by Washington, D.C. to check out the Electrify Expo. Now in its third year of nationwide shows, the Electrify Expo calls itself “North America's largest electric vehicle festival filled with over 1 million square feet of the world's top electric brands.” At every stop, visitors can find out about, crawl around in, drive and ride just about any personal conveyance that uses a battery for propulsion.
Truth be told, when the show's PR team reached out to us with an invite, we only considered going after finding out about an area showcasing battery-electric tuner cars. EV tuning is undoubtedly going to be huge—eventually—which got us curious about these early days. We figured we’d brave whatever the rest of the expo was to find out what’s the equivalent of nitrous for a Tesla.
See, the EV event scene is still such that one never knows if they’ll show up to a mix of science and county fairs with a few cars on display just for truth in advertising, or if they’ll show up to a parking lot with 26 cars, 10 of them locked, 10 of them homemade, and 6 guarded by promotional hires desperate to tap all your identifying info a tablet before dispensing dubious and superficial information.
Which is to say, we didn’t expect much. And that makes us chuffed to report: Electrify Expo is great. We hadn’t been strolling the lot outside the old RFK Stadium for five minutes before thinking, “This feels like an old-school auto show!” The exclamation to that point came from a group of four who cut me off to reach the C40 Recharge in the Volvo booth, one of them exclaiming as if he were the group expert and as if his friends were deaf, “THAT’S THE LEAST EXPENSIVE ONE! AND IT’S BEEEE-YOUUUUU-TI-FULLLLLL!”
I wasn’t there to judge, I was there for the enthusiasm.
Automakers had built small, simple, open booths, parked cars in them, then provided visitors the kind of interactions that will do the most good for anyone wondering about or interested in an EV. We only saw two cars that were off limits, the new Volkswagen ID.Buzz and the Ford F-100 Eluminator. Volvo wouldn’t let me get an espresso from their chic little trailer, either, unless I visited the EX90 Experience trailer first. Otherwise, it was a free-for-all.
Tesla had a large booth full of cars. BMW had two i7s open for everyone to sit in, next to the Ford booth with that Eluminator and an unlocked Mustang Mach-E GT and F-150 Lightning showing their cooler-chest-frunk trick. Kia had a couple of EV9’s in its shaded area, every time we walked by we saw a one of the stand attendants sitting in the front passenger’s seat answering questions for an SUV full of the fascinated. Mitsubishi brought two Outlander PHEVs, both open, each staffed with someone to answer questions. Anyone who wanted to see and sit in the new Polestar 3 could do so. When I sat in it, a visitor walking around the back of the hatch looked at me and sighed, “Man, this is nice.”
I’m sure there were many other exclamations made that day that didn’t involve Volvo or Volvo-adjacent products, I just wasn't around to hear them.
By the time we sat down with a gent called BJ who started all of this, we were genuinely intrigued. BJ grew up in San Diego and was an ICE, JDM car guy. "I always felt like, if you couldn't hear the rumble of a V8 or the sing of an inline-four turbo, forget about it, you’re never getting me behind the wheel," because "electric vehicles lack soul."
After relocating to Austin, Texas, and while running his own company putting on large events, he went out to kick some tires and took a spin in a Tesla Model S. "The experience was a game changer," he said. When he investigated the business of interacting with EVs, he found the situation wanting. "At auto shows, if you do have a demo [EV] experience, many times these … are at the bottom, in the basement of a convention center. I mean, you suck all the energy out."
In some ways, namely this one, the Expo is the opposite of an auto show. Barriers are arranged so visitors are compelled to walk by every stand to reach the next section. That ensures OEMs get passing traffic, we get it. After navigating the chute, though, one reaches the drive fleet that bookends the far end of the event opposite the entry. In D.C., which is the expo’s smallest show, 10 OEMs brought 29 cars from the VW ID.4 to the aforementioned i7 that visitors could take for drives on a two-mile route on D.C. streets. Being inside the city, the route lacked a highway portion, but D.C.’s short blocks and arrow-straight roads would allow those new to EVs to experience 95% of the most important novelties about EVs like acceleration, regen braking, subdued NVH, stop-and-go driver assistance features, massive displays and enhanced infotainment integration.
Other forms of electrified transport are equally well served with autocross-like areas laid out to try e-bikes, e-scooters, and e-skateboards. We were told there were almost 100 vehicles and e-mobility products at the show.
BJ also experienced what we mentioned earlier, "volunteer-run events by enthusiasts." He believed "there was nothing that was going to attract the world's leading auto manufacturers to invest in having a footprint and a demo experience at a festival."
OEMs are notoriously wary of grassroots efforts, but a few took a chance on BJ for Electrify Expo’s first year in 2021. Fast forward to 2023 and the first place for the U.S. public to experience the Volvo EX90 and Polestar 3 was at the Electrify Expo. And in coastal locales, ride-and-drive doesn’t just mean cars. "In LA, we had boats," BJ said, "and we've done personal electric watercraft demos on the water. It's the right way to experience what's happening with electric transportation right now."
