Cincinnati’s Earth Day celebration was held at a new location in 2026, Washington Park in downtown Cincinnati. Challenges included figuring out where to run the EV test drive operation/showcase since the park had no place to put the cars. The city came up with a solution: rent a nearby parking lot. We staffed two booths; our volunteers inside the park engaged people and encouraged them to come over to our test drive/showcase headquarters across the street. Our test drive route worked well—no reports of people getting lost. With our rented parking lot exclusively reserved for EVs, as test drives departed it was wonderful not having to swiftly reserve the spot with a traffic cone.
The Earth Day Festival is traditionally one of Cincinnati’s largest EV events of the year, with thousands of festival attendees, food trucks, music and more. This year we had our best-ever EV ride count with 66 test drives and 28 EV rides. That’s a total of 94 test drives + rides, well over our previous best of 80. We had 15 test drive/ride EVs, including Cadillac Optiq; Chevy Bolt and Equinox EV; Tesla 3, Y, and S; Audi e-tron, Rivian R1T, Hyundai Ioniq 6, Mercedes EQB, Subaru Solterra, and F-150 Lightning. Plus even more for EV Showcase, including Ryvid electric motorcycles, Tesla X and Cybertruck, VW ID.4, Hyundai Ioniq 9, Toyota RAV4 PHEV, Prius plug-in, bZ, and new C-HR. New this year: a full-size electric school bus on display.
Thanks to Tesla in Oakley for bringing a Model 3 and Y, giving adventurous participants the opportunity to have the car take the test drive while they supervised! Thanks to McCluskey Chevrolet for bringing a new Bolt 2027 and an Equinox EV, relatively affordable EVs with broad appeal. Thanks to First Student for bringing an electric school bus for people to climb aboard with a driver happy to talk about his electric bus. Thanks most of all to all our EV owner volunteers who shared their experience driving electric with people taking their first EV test drive or ride.
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