Quote:
Originally Posted by Frank
Thanks for doing this. I'm pretty sure ecomodder was known by another name way-back-when, can someone confirm the history for me? Wow - where does the time go?!
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The path to EcoModder started in 2005 (busy year):
April, 2005: I pulled the trigger and bought my first Metro (1998 Pontiac Firefly), a car that had long fascinated me for its high MPG ratings. I immediately started tinkering with it to improve MPG.
June, 2005:
EV World published an article about Phil's aero-modded Toyota pickup (original link is now dead). That article opened my eyes to the big MPG gains that could be found through aerodynamics/streamlining.
August 2005: The
MaxMPG Yahoo Group was launched as a direct result of the very long comment thread beneath the EV World article. (It was EV World's most commented-on article.) Many of the article commenters joined the group. I didn't start MaxMPG, but I moderated it for a few years.
September, 2005: I launched
MetroMPG.com to document the mods I was doing to my Firefly.
September, 2005:
GasSavers.org forum coincidentally launched later the same month by Matt & Ben (SVOboy). By early '06 I had discovered & joined there, meeting Tim (Daox) and a bunch of other familiar members. I eventually became a moderator there too.
Fall 2007: Matt had lost interest in running GasSavers, so some of us moderators had negotiated to officially take it over. Unfortunately, at the last minute Matt had a change of heart, so we left and started EcoModder. Most of our earliest members came over from MaxMPG and GasSavers.
The rest is history!
Epilogue:
The MaxMPG group petered out and was eventually killed when Yahoo ended Groups.
GasSavers ended up turning into a bit of a Unicorn Corral, and ultimately kind of petered out. Fuelly eventually acquired the site from Matt and tried to re-animate the community into their site/app.
(Here's a
slightly more detailed version of the above backstory.)