Before Ry Armstrong ever thought about electric vehicles, they were thinking about who gets left out and who gets to move freely.
In Seattle, the gap between who can afford to own a car and who can’t has only been widening in recent years. According to 2023 Census data, 20% of Seattle households did not own a car and nearly nine in ten of those car-free households were renters.
Today, Armstrong is the executive director at ZEV Co-op, a Washington-based nonprofit that rents out electric vehicles with a mission built around environmental equity and removing transportation as a barrier to access.
ZEV’s vehicles are stationed across Seattle. Using ZEV’s app, members can see where the nearest available car is parked, then schedule a reservation. Vehicles are accessible seven days a week, around the clock, so members pick up the car, drive where they need to go, and return it to the same location to plug in and charge for the next person.
ZEV’s mission goes beyond simply providing electric vehicles; the co-op is focused on putting car access within reach of communities that have limited access to affordable and reliable transportation. It aims to let people use electric vehicles without the high costs of purchasing and maintaining one themselves, connecting environmental sustainability with social equity so that the placement of cars in communities benefits everyone, especially those who have been traditionally underserved by transportation systems.
Transportation is the second largest household expense for United States residents, and that burden falls unevenly across race and ethnicity. A 2026 study by The Century Foundation found that Black, Hispanic, American Indian and Alaska Native people taking out auto loans were charged higher interest rates than white and Asian borrowers. Specifically when discussing EV’s, a 2024 study in Nature Communications, drawing on 2021 data from 121 million U.S. households found Black households to have the least access to public EV charging infrastructure in rural areas compared to White, Hispanic, and Asian households and are the second least served group in urban areas. Seattle’s own equity research displays the pattern pointing to generations of wealth disparity that shape who can afford a car tracing back to policy reforms from the 1950s. It is this gap between who transportation systems were built for and who is left out that drew Armstrong to this work in the first place.
Armstrong started their work in the arts field as well as nonprofit, doing development work at QLaw Foundation and serving as Co-Executive Director of Sustainable Seattle. They described a “pressure to be more active in fighting climate change, when it felt guilty to make art just for the sake of making art.” That pressure led Armstrong to pivot, turning to a master’s program in sustainable development and international relations. “I wanted a more active role in the community and in organizing,” they said, which led them to ZEV.
What ties these paths together, Armstrong says, is an artist’s instinct that one never leaves behind. “I think my artistic and queer side has allowed me to be open to the empathy that the community can give,” they say. They describe it as using the same muscle that shaped their work as an artist: the ability to notice what isn’t working, refusing to accept injustice as fact, and being able to imagine something else in its place.
They described an issue in which the app could take up to five days to onboard a user and grant them access to transportation. ZEV is now in the process of cutting that onboarding time down to fifteen minutes, part of an app relaunch planned for this October, to make sure the community’s needs are actually being met. Armstrong connects this work back to their art practice, thinking about bridging the gap in who gets to move freely.
Armstrong described a moment when a young ZEV member in East Buffalo became emotional that his community had access to a program like this. This reaction, Armstrong says, is evidence of something larger than convenience. “They see themselves reflected in the actual staff and workers, not only running the program but responsible for making sure it’s meeting the community needs.”
When asked about the future of ZEV, Armstrong didn’t hesitate: they plan to grow it from its current $1 million operation into a $10 million one, and to make it a household name. This growth matters most in a city such as Seattle in which the cost of car ownership and living have climbed throughout the last several years. Armstrong reaches for the same instinct that got them here in the first place, the belief that a problem people have accepted as fixed is often just one nobody has taken the time to reimagine.
“I want EV car sharing to be the springboard to get us through the fossil fuel era we’re in and into an electric vehicle future,” Armstrong says. It’s an ambitious goal, and Armstrong knows the biggest obstacle is not expansion or funding. It’s convincing people that something built and shared together can serve them better than something built and owned alone. Armstrong carries this mindset into their work, the belief that community, built collectively, can carry people further than any one person can carry themselves.
(Editor’s note 9/24/26): A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that ZEV executive director Ry Armstrong was the founder of ZEV. A correction has been made.
