Almost nobody showed up.

The event — organized through Eventbrite and featuring booths for home electrification alongside the car demos — was a ghost town. The highlights? A woman backed a Rivian into a Ford pickup. A group of protestors showed up to yell about Tesla. And exactly two proud EV owners rolled up to show off their rides. That was basically the whole festival.

So what happened? A few things, and they're all worth paying attention to if you care about how public dollars and nonprofit grant money get spent on "community engagement."

First, the marketing was apparently nonexistent. As one Bay Area resident put it bluntly: "I didn't hear about it. Poorly marketed." That's a fair indictment when you're throwing an event in one of the most tech-connected regions on the planet and can't fill a parking lot.

But the deeper issue is market saturation. This is Silicon Valley in 2026. You can't drive three blocks without passing a Model Y. As one local observed, "Everyone that wants an EV in the Bay Area has one already. There's no dearth of people to talk to about EVs or dealerships to go do a test drive. This event is better for places with low EV adoption."

Exactly. And this is where the fiscal reality check comes in. Events like these are often funded by nonprofits, utility incentive programs, and sometimes public agencies trying to hit electrification targets. If the target audience already owns the product, you're throwing a party for people who don't need convincing — and apparently, they don't even want the free tacos.

There's a broader lesson here about the diminishing returns of spending money to evangelize things people have already adopted. The Bay Area doesn't need another EV awareness campaign. It needs affordable housing, functional transit, and streets that aren't cratered. Maybe redirect some of that "community engagement" budget toward problems that haven't already solved themselves.

The hype cycle did its job. The market moved. Time for the advocacy class to catch up.