Member's Letter to the Editor gives Tesla its Day in the Long Island News

The pen may indeed be mightier than the sword, but this past week in Long Island, the keyboard has shown to best them both.

On September 18, an article with the favorable title of Long Island leads the state in electric vehicle use, report says was published in Newsday, a major Long Island newspaper, which caught the attention of New York City TOCNYS member Stephanie D.

In response to the article, on Sept. 22 there was a letter to the editor from a Kona EV owner about the dearth of public fast charging. It applied to his vehicle, but implied that there was a lack of fast charging IN GENERAL, which Stephanie knew to not be the case, especially for Teslas. As it turns out Teslas, comprising 89% of nearly 5,000 purely electric vehicles registered in Nassau and Suffolk counties, enjoy 4 Superchargers on Long Island - far more than is available to the non-Tesla EVs.

Being a volunteer for the Sierra Club, leading a team of other volunteers who write and submit letters to the editor of newspapers around New York State, Stephanie knew an opportunity when it appeared. This was a chance to promote the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by promoting EVs - where the goals of the Sierra Club’s campaign fighting climate change overlaps with the goals of the TOCNYS.

Armed with the data from NYSERDA’s wonderful online Electric Vehicle Registration Map, she drafted a response to the aforementioned letter to the editor and partnered with Long Island resident Asad N. to submit it. After a brief editing process Newsday accepted the submission and it was published on September 30! Here is the link to that letter.*

UPDATE

As a testimony to the efficacy of letter writing, several Long Island Tesla owners have since become TOCNYS members, citing Stephanie and Asad’s letter as the direct source.

If you are interested in writing for the cause of EVs, Tesla, and TOCNYS, please send an email to info@tocnys.org we'll find you a place on the front lines!

* Due to a paywall, it’s possible that the letter won’t be easily available to read, so here it is in image form:

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