It Started Out as a Retirement Project…
What started as a retirement project for Peter Oliver has turned into a rapidly-growing business that’s bringing alternative fuel vehicle technology to students around the world — including several California Community Colleges and high schools.
…and Turned Into a Rapidly Growing Business.
Peter Oliver co-founded The Switch Lab, maker of the Switch vehicle, in 2009. At the time, he was teaching at Santa Rosa Community College and had a business converting high-end cars from gas to electric power. The business did well financially, but Oliver said he felt a desire to do something that would have a broader impact.
“I met Jim McGreen who had experience with global electric vehicles and together we thought we could make a low-cost, four-passenger vehicle and get it on the market,” Oliver said. “We came up with Switch and realized it would be really good for schools.”
Instructors assemble a Switch Vehicle at a training held in August 2018.
While teaching at Santa Rosa, Oliver said his classes never finished building an electric vehicle in one semester, which meant that students did not get to see the entire process. In designing Switch, he knew he wanted something that could be assembled in a matter of weeks, then taken apart for the next group of students to reassemble.
Training Sessions for Instructors
Oliver and his team at The Switch Lab coordinate training sessions for instructors to learn how to assemble and disassemble the vehicles before deploying them into their classrooms. Instructors from 11 high schools and community colleges recently attended this training to learn how to build the vehicles purchased as part of the Clean Fuels Transportation Pilot Career Opportunity Project, funded by the California Energy Commission in partnership with the Advanced Transportation & Logistics sector of the California Community Colleges and Cerritos Community College District.
Not only does the Switch vehicle provide hands-on experience, but it also serves as a tool for discussing the future of alternative fuel vehicles and broader topics like climate change.
“The amount of resources that U.S. has used since World War II is more than the world had used since the beginning of time.” Oliver said. “If we our want lifestyle to stay the same, we need to make changes elsewhere and electric vehicles are one way to do that.”
The Switch Lab is based in Sebastopol, California, but has clients all over the world. Moving forward, Oliver sees the opportunity for everyone to learn how to build their own electric vehicle, much like people made their own wagons and came together to build steam engines during the Industrial Revolution.
“We’re starting a small network of distributed manufacturing,” Oliver said. “Dealers will buy kits from us and teach the people in their communities how to build these cars. When they do it, they understand how simple electric cars really are.”
