Special Seminar: A Quick Look at the Road Ahead and Life with an Electric Car

A special seminar will be held 8:35-9:25 a.m. Friday, Oct. 3,  in CHEM 144. Refreshments will be provided before the seminar at 8 a.m. in CHEM 133. Phillip Crippen, with over 15 years experience helping companies resolve business pains, works coast to coast with leading companies to understand and transform their business using Oracle Applications and Technologies.

Crippen is a cloud transformation architect and master principal sales consultant with Oracle Corp. In a prior life, Crippen developed industrial control systems for steel mills and paper mills with Siemens AG. This period included two years of living and working in Germany. Today, these interests are satisfied with his electric vehicle conversion project (1997 BMW 318ti).

Go from point A to point B. It sounds simple. But along the way, we make choices about how we’re going to get there. For almost 100 years, we’ve assumed that automotive transportation involved gasoline, an internal combustion engine, and a car-body. But now we have choices in how we get from point A to point B.

Traditional auto manufacturers are finally bringing electric cars to market. However; hobbyists, tree-huggers, and electro-motorheads have for many years taken things into their own hands and developed their own approaches to non-fossil-fueled transportation. One-off conversions and pre-engineered kits make it possible for individuals to transform their vehicle from gas to all electric. Conversion projects range from sporty Porsches to pedestrian Geo sedans to utilitarian S-10 and Ranger pickups. Life with an electric car is a little bit different than our current use of gas or diesel automobiles. As more and more commercially produced electric vehicles hit the road, there are going to be issues around usage patterns, “fuel” distribution, service and recycling. Drivers of converted electric vehicles have an inside look at the different types of decisions and events that lie ahead for the broader public as electric cars become more common.