As it turns out, car dealers seem to know even less than buyers When we are talking about electric vehiclesand they really don’t seem very keen to learn about them. The Washington Post i have spoken to a number of customers who said that the dealers have tried redirect them to gas cars or gave them vague or blatantly false answers about electric cars.
Simply put, many US buyers say car dealers are not prepared for the transition to electric vehicles, and that’s a big problem when you consider the fact that they’re responsible for selling the majority of new cars. Adding the fact that the biden administration aims for two-thirds of new cars sold in the US to be electric by 2032 and the hundreds of billions of dollars that automakers have spent on electric carsmy friend, you are cooking a very nasty stew.
There are similar stories of misinformation spreading across the country, according to The message.
When news started to come out about electric cars in early 2016, Michael Young, a self-described “car guy,” knew he wanted to try one. One afternoon he walked into his local dealership and asked to test drive the BMW i3, a small, sports car with a range of up to 150 miles. The seller stopped it. “You can’t drive that car on the highway,” Young recalled the salesman saying, explaining that the car couldn’t exceed 45 miles per hour.
“I was kind of blown away by it,” Young said.
Young knew it could go much faster – and after convincing the salesman to take it for a test drive, he ended up buying the i3.
[…]
James Richards, CEO of a water heating company in Davis, California, spent days test driving electric cars at Volkswagen, Tesla, Chevy and Ford. But the 40-year-old found the dealership experience “terrifying” – dealers didn’t seem to know much about the EVs they were selling. “I felt like I knew more than they did,” Richards said.
Richards originally hoped to buy an F-150 Lightning, but the truck was ordered late. The seller could only provide him with an expensive trim that came with a high trade markup. That marking added “insult to injury,” Richards said. He ended up buying a Tesla Model Y. Tesla salespeople “make you look like EV geeks,” Richards explained. “All the other dealerships: Ford, VW, the GM people — they didn’t seem like specialists.”
There are a number of other—frankly shocking—stories just like these The Washington Post articlewhich you should really check out!
There are a number of reasons why dealers don’t really care that much sale of electric vehicles. Their technology is a far more unknown quantity to dealers, profit margins are much thinner and sales tend to be a little slower. In general, this really wears the dealers down and many of them don’t even want to bother, according to The message.
According to a research that the Sierra Club conducted at the end of 2022, 66 percent of dealerships did not have an EV available for sale. This was at the height of EV supply chain problems, but 45 percent of those dealers—or 30 percent of all dealers surveyed—said they wouldn’t offer an EV even if they could.
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Dealers may have less economic incentive to sell electric vehicles. Buzz Smith, a former Chevrolet salesman who now helps train dealers to sell EVs, says it can take much longer to sell an electric car than a gas-powered one. Selling a gas car, he said, can take no more than an hour per visit, which brings in a good commission.
But for electric vehicles, “it was usually four visits, one hour each, before they bought an EV,” Smith said. Customers want to be sure they understand the technology, how to charge it, and more. “So I’m volunteering to take a 75 percent pay cut — and no salesperson wants to do that.”
Despite all this, some retailers are clearly working to embrace the EV revolution. Ford dealer president tells The message that its traders participate in training offered by Ford on how to sell EVs. However, they’ve apparently only sold about a dozen electric cars so far.
No matter what, it’s going to be an uphill battle to get dealers on board with the whole EV thing.
“Dealers don’t want to change the model,” said a law professor who studies dealer law and economics at the University of Michigan. “They want to be watchdogs.”
Anyway, I don’t want to give too much away as this is a really interesting read! Head to The Washington Post for the full story.