Happy 5th Birthday to EcoModder! (Party loot bags: win prizes! ScanGauges etc.)

[talonts]

Congrats, down a beverage of your choosing.

And send the S-e my way ;-)

[Weather Spotter]

I only missed the first 20 months as a member, trolled for 6 months before.

Lots of great content!

[HyperMileQC]

Happy birthday EM!

[MetroMPG]

Originally Posted by mechman600

Hey Darin, how about some history

Ask and ye shall receive!

Oh, but it's a tangled web...

As far as I'm concerned, the two main characters in this drama are Phil Knox a.k.a. aerohead (indirectly), and more directly, SVOboy (Ben... mostly not here any more since he moved to Japan under the witness protection program or something).

2005 was a busy year...

GasSavers.org forum launched.

Trivia: SVOboy (Ben - EcoModder's AWOL co-founder) originally got that forum going with its owner, Matt after meeting on the Honda-tech forum. I think the story is they were tired of the lack of appreciation about fuel economy discussion from the hard-core Honda gearheads, so Matt started GasSavers with urging from SVOboy.

I started MetroMPG.com in September 2005, coincidentally the same week GasSavers.org started up (which I didn't know about yet).

Eventually someone on GasSavers linked to one of my posts, which led me to that forum. So I signed up. Met moderator Ben (SVOboy) and a bunch of others. Eventually became a moderator.

How does Phil/aerohead figure in all this?

At that time I had also been hanging out at/moderating the now defunct maxmpg Yahoo group which started as a direct result of the June 2005 EV World article about Phil's aero mods to his Toyota pickup (EV WORLD: Free Fuel Riding on the Wind ). (At one time that was the most-commented-on article at EV World, but it appears those comments have since been lost.) I had been administering that group for its owner who had gone to Iraq as a member of the U.S. military.

Eventually, Matt lost interest in GasSavers. Late in 2007, Ben and I negotiated with him to officially take it over since we and a few other mods had basically been running the place in Matt's absense, but the agreement fell apart at the last minute.

So, we struck out on our own and started EcoModder in December, 2007.

Many of EcoModder's earliest members came from the maxmpg group (invited over en masse with the blessing of that group's founder), and GasSavers.

[btracing]

Cool thing, 5 years of spreading the gospel of paying less for the same distance. Or of course, being more friendly to the environment. Economical and ecological all in one!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

[2000neon]

That's cool, it's always nice to understand the history and where it came from. Hopefully there will be another 5+ years of great info and discussion to come.

[Lazarus]

You come far Pilgrim.

Congrats Darin. Not only on the site and it's longevity but the ripples you have made locally and globally.

[Smurf]

Instead of congratulating you, I'd like to just thank you.

[Mustang Dave]

Member since May, 2009. Thanks for helping me get better MPG from my Mustang and my F-250!

[silverinsight2]

Thanks for all of the great ideas!