Highlights from the 2016 Victoria Day Parade

The Victoria Day Parade and the VEVC

Lisa Locke, VEVC Editor

It was a perfect day, not too hot and not too rainy, but just right for a parade into downtown Victoria, BC to celebrate Queen Victoria’s birthday.  The Victoria EV Club had 6 electric cars and one of them was towing a camping trailer!  See above, a shiny new Tesla Model X is towing the solar-paneled TeslaXCanada trailer that two of our board members are planning to take across Canada in a show of what an electric car can do!  Over 100,000 people showed up to cheer the parade on, with Chek News covering the event live (see us at the 1hour 00min mark) and streaming it across Canada — my parents in the Northwest Territories were watching too!

We had some great help carrying our banner, thank you!  And behind the banner is a Tesla Model S, Nissan LEAF, Kia SoulEV, eSmart, BMW i3, Tesla Model X with trailer, and another eSmart. The 3 km of waving and cheering didn’t seem very long!  Especially from the quiet LEAF I was driving.  People watching and waving kept saying “you’re so quiet!” and “are you sure it’s on?”  Sometimes I called out “vroom vroom!” Most people I think were pleasantly surprised and pleased that electric non-polluting cars are a reality and are prevalent in our beautiful city. We really just want to show that driving a non-polluting car is possible and practical, can be sleek and sexy, and also can be strong enough to tow a trailer!

And big Thank Yous to our parade coordinator, Silke, and our fearless leader Fred, you are both an inspiration.