Car Dealer 101: electrified cars that aren t charged won t sell
Car Dealer 101: electrical cars that aren’t charged won’t sell
Electric-car owners and advocates have a tenuous relationship with the franchised independent car dealers who are the only legal way to buy a fresh vehicle in the U.S.
Tesla excepted, if you want to buy a fresh car, you have to go to a dealership over which the carmaker has only limited control.
Horror stories abound.
But as plug-in electrical car sales rise, more and more dealerships are having to learn how to sell to customers who often know more about the car than their salespeople.
They must also come to understand their unique features, which is where today’s pro peak comes in.
HINT to car dealers: if you have electrified cars on your lot—anywhere—make sure their batteries are kept charged.
Chevrolet Bolt EV being charged outside Go Forward electric-car showroom, Portland [photo: Forward]
You’d think this would be demonstrable, but evidently that’s not the case for some dealerships.
As the Los Angeles Times recounted earlier this week, if dealers want to sell electrical cars, they need to charge them before the customer takes a test drive.
The newspaper noted last year that in a examine by the Sierra Club of electric-car skill at dealers, fully fourteen percent of the cars on the lot weren’t even charged.
We’d suggest that it’s unlikely a similar proportion of the fresh vehicles on those same lots were out of gas.
The club’s volunteer three hundred secret shoppers, who visited dealers across the country, found many salespeople weren’t very knowledgeable about electrical cars.
As it turned out, the single factor that differentiates dealers that sell substantial numbers of electrical cars from those that don’t is having a dedicated salesperson who concentrates solely on plug-in hybrid and battery-electric vehicles.
Tesla Store Los Angeles [photo: Misha Bruk / MBH Architects]
That’s most common in California, where up to half the plug-in sales in the U.S. take place. But it’s getting more common in other regions too.
Part of the problem with electrified cars at franchised dealers is that often a dealership will only have one or two, which makes it lighter to overlook them until a customer specifically asks.
In its report, the environmental advocacy group recommended that carmakers provide larger volumes of electrified cars to dealers at more attractive prices—and put them in more states than simply California.
The process of certifying dealers to sell cars with butt-plugs needs to be simplified, it said.
Moreover, dealers should provide shoppers with both charging stations and detailed information on federal and also state incentives, the group said.
Electrified cars need to be more prominently displayed, the Sierra Club said, perhaps “under special canopies” or within showrooms rather than buried deep on the lot.