Salem Kicks Gas EV Event
April was Drive Electric Month and for the past couple years, Salem (Massachusetts) has held an EV event at the high school. This year’s event was held on Sunday April 27th on a rather raw, sometimes rainy and very windy day.
I heard about this event just a few days before from a post by the Ioniq Guy on YouTube. In this post he mentioned that he would be showing one of his Ioniqs at the show. Salem is about 100 miles from me, but I had that Sunday free so thought I might make the trip. I am registered to display my Polestar 2 at an EV show in Tamworth, NH in May so I also thought it would be good to see what these shows are like.
Sunday morning arrived and I decided to give it a go, even though the weather looked iffy. It would be my first trip out-of-state with an EV! Although I never drove my Ioniq EV outside of Maine in the year I had it, but I was eager to try such a trip with the Polestar 2.
The show started at 1pm so I left about 11:20am or so. When I left Maine it was raining and rather cold (about 45F or so), which is not great EV driving weather, at least from an efficiency standpoint. The Polestar 2, being all-wheel-drive, had no issues handling those conditions.
This trip was almost all highway (I95) with just a few miles at the end driving through Peabody to Salem. After having driven about 98 miles I arrived at the event at exactly 1pm with 53% battery and the car saying it had 120 miles of range. Doing the return trip with that state of charge would be cutting it close, so I definitely planned to stop and add a little charge before I headed back, which is also what Google Maps recommended.
After signing in to the event, I saw that the Ioniq Guy (Corbin) was standing next to his red Ioniq 6 so I headed there first to say hello. Corbin is a really great, down-to-earth guy. We talked about his Ioniqs, my Polestar 2 and lamented the lack of small EVs in the US. I liked the Ioniq 6, but that car sure is long! I also asked him about life as a YouTuber and he had some interesting insights there. Given my newfound Polestar enthusiasm he suggested I might want to consider starting a Polestar-focused YouTube channel, but I told him that I like writing and feared that I might not like making videos, which seemed like a lot of work. He did offer some tips, but like many YouTubers expressed frustration with the “YouTube Algorithm”.
Anyway, I don’t think I’ll be doing YouTube videos anytime soon. Substack does have some video features and I’ll probably start looking into how I can incorporate those into some posts at some point.
Plenty of people wanted to talk to the Ioniq Guy, so I moved on to looking at some other cars and talked with the owners of a Honda Insight plug-in hybrid which they really liked. It seemed like it was essentially an early version of an Accord EV. We did talk about how some people feel that a PHEV is often considered the worse of both worlds, but a Honda is a reliable vehicle so it probably is not really a concern. I personally think a PHEV can be a great way for people to dip their toes into the EV pool.
I got to see a Mustang Mach-E in a lovely baby-blue, which looked really nice. It’s obviously an SUV, but it does have a sporty look to it being more low-slung than others. The interior looked great.
Next to it was a Toyota RAV4 plug-in hybrid (PHEV), which was interesting to me because my wife drives a regular ICE RAV4. The PHEV didn’t really look all that different than the regular one.
As I was talking with people they would ask if I had an EV and I was certainly eager to talk about my newly acquired Polestar 2. Many wanted to see it, but I was not signed up as an exhibitor since the sign-up page has said they were full and didn’t need any more cars to display.
Unfortunately for this show, the weather was not great and it had a negative affect on turnout. This meant there was plenty of room in the lot. Shortly after I was there, the organizer came over to me and offered to have me pull my car into the lot with the others on display. I’m actually not sure why she came over to see me specifically, but it was probably because I was there when the show started.
So I quickly went from being a visitor to being an exhibitor! I pulled my car around, backed it in and opened the windows so people could peek inside. Unfortunately the weather was chaotic by then. The winds were insane slamming car doors and knocking things over and it kept spitting rain, so I ended up having to keep the windows closed. Since I didn’t go through the normal process, I also didn’t have one of the cool “fact sheets” that were on the other cars. Here’s the one from Corbin’s car:
So for this post, I created my own:
I was happy that lots of people immediately came by to look a my Polestar 2, which was the only one there. One person even asked if it was a Lucid!
Everyone absolutely loved the color and loved the exterior styling. I did talk with a Volvo XC40 owner and he thought the interior looked quite similar to his car. People liked my Polestar, but were not impressed with the range. Getting 200 miles on the highway is on the low end of things, especially with some newer EVs, but it seems to be working just fine for me and should continue to improve as the weather warms.
I did get asked if I was confident that Polestar will stick around in the US, given the current tariff tax situation. I said that the Polestar 3 is actually made in the US and given Polestar’s close ties with Volvo, I felt they are in it for the long-haul.
There were a lot of EVs at this show, with several Ioniq 5s, a mini Cooper and Countryman, Volvo EX30, Tesla Y, Cybertruck, Rivian R1T, BMW i4, Kia EV6, Chevy Equinox, Porsche Taycan, Chevy Bolt and probably others I forgot or missed. I unfortunately did not get to see most of the vehicles as I ended up talking with people at my car for most of the the afternoon. And sadly, I did not take nearly enough pictures!
As things were wrapping up, Corbin stopped by to look at my Polestar 2. It turned out he had done a couple video reviews of the 2024 Polestar 2 on his channel, which I had forgotten about. He liked the Polestar 2, but remembered he had lots of trouble fitting in the back seat and tried again this time. I think he fit slightly better in my car than the one he drove, but that’s because I’m a lot shorter than he is, so my seat was further forward. The headroom still is not great back there for tall people, though.
Afterwards, I stopped to charge at a Chargepoint station before heading over to GameZone in Salem to see if there was anything I might to purchase to write about for Goto 101.
The Chargepoint station only had two chargers and one was occupied when I arrived. It was only sending along 30kW to my car, which was horribly slow, so I left and went to GameZone and came back. This time the other charger was available and it charged at a more reasonable 70kW.
For some reason Google Maps wanted me to charge to 74%, which seemed slightly high. Regardless, I stopped at 75% and then headed home (after stopping at Sonic — love the Sonic Smash burger!) and arrived to my house with 23% battery and 50 miles of range.
That Chargepoint charger was not great so I think I would have rather not charged at all in Massachusetts and instead waited to charge again at the Kennebunk Service Plaza on the turnpike in Maine, which would have only been about 70 miles away. I still need to learn more about how to get Google Maps to bend to my will with charging stops!
Anyway, this trip was great fun! It was wonderful meeting The Ioniq Guy and other folks. Plus I now know more about what to expect when I display my Polestar 2 at the Tamworth, NH show on May 18th.
GameZone was a cool shop, but alas, I didn’t find anything I needed.