I recently traveled to San Diego to attend the Plug-In 2013 Conference. The event was held at the convention center from September 30^th to October 3^rd. The program included a public night over the weekend where attendees had an opportunity to drive different electric vehicles currently on the market.

The Leviton booth displayed our latest electric vehicle supply equipment. The event had nearly 40 exhibitors which included automakers, utilities, service providers and other infrastructure manufacturers. I consider this one of the best events to network with industry staff.

We were fortunate to have our EVSEs not only in our booth but with our automaker partners as well. One of our EVSE kiosks was in the Toyota booth near the RAV 4 EV, while our Evr-Green® 320 was featured with the Honda Fit EV and Honda Accord PHEV. The Ford Fusion was positioned next to our EVB55, did you know that the EVB55 delivers up to 7.7KW and features low carbon footprint materials in the enclosure?

If you would like to learn more about our charging stations designed specifically for Ford Electric Vehicle customers please visit www.leviton.com/ford

Our Director of Engineering, Ken Brown was asked to speak during the conference. His presentation emphasized the importance of safety in electrical vehicle infrastructure. Our mission statement with our electric vehicle supply equipment is safety and ease of use. We have included many proprietary technologies in all of our EVSEs – including the use of ground monitoring circuit. As you may know the ground monitor/interrupter is a life safety circuit.  The ground could become disconnected at any time due to a variety of reasons or sources including a broken pin or sleeve, punctured cord, corrosion etc.

I had a chance to attend a number of presentations. One of the more interesting was a presentation by a Nissan Vice President. He stated that the Nissan Leaf is selling well in Atlanta. I was surprised to learn that the Leaf outsells all other Nissan vehicles in Atlanta. I have read articles that list the top 5 cities with electric vehicles…can you name them…?

Half Of All Electric Cars Are Sold In 5 Cities; Can You Name Them?

One of the interesting things about the show was a special event onboard the USS Midway. The evening included light dinner and drinks and was sponsored by San Diego Gas & Electric. It is not very often you get to walk aboard an aircraft carrier. The USS Midway was commissioned a week after World War II and was the largest ship in the world until 1955.

The last day of the show was a teardown day…also a good time to pick-up extra souvenirs from the other exhibitors :)
My next stop was south of the border at our manufacturing plant in Tijuana. I was pleased to see one of our charging stations outside the plant. We ended up driving a Ford CMAX Energi from Chula Vista to our plant in Tijuana.

I drove from Tijuana to LA on Thursday and after a few customer meetings, flew out the next day back home to Detroit.