News from the US, the biggest impediment to EV sales isn't availability of charging stations, manufacturing cost or anything like that....what is it then? It's car dealers, they don't want to sell them! EV's take longer to sell than ICE cars, a lot of the time because the people selling them know nothing about them, so they try to discourage people from buying them. Also ongoing profits are lower because EV's don't need as much servicing as ICE cars and the dealers lose out on that income. So what do they do to discourage people? Here's a selection;
First, simply don't stock them so buyers if they want a car soon have to wait for for the backorder;
Some dealers, however, don’t seem to want to offer electric cars: According to a survey that the Sierra Club conducted at the end of 2022, 66 percent of dealerships did not have an EV available for sale. That 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.
Initially, Richards was hoping to buy an F-150 Lightning, but the truck was back-ordered. The salesperson could only get him an expensive trim that came with a high dealer markup. That markup added “insult to injury,”
If that doesn't work, just lie;
As news started coming out about electric cars in early 2016, Michael Young, a self-described “car guy,” knew he wanted to try one. One afternoon, he strolled into his local dealership and asked to test drive the BMW i3, a small, sporty car with a range of up to 150 miles. The salesperson stopped him. “You can’t drive that car on the highway,” Young recalls the salesperson saying, explaining that the car couldn’t go over 45 miles per hour.
Or just be unable to answer questions;
Frustrated customers told The Washington Post that dealers tried to redirect their attention toward gas cars, or gave incorrect or unclear answers to questions about charging and day-to-day electric vehicle use.
And even go to the extent of trying to place bogus charges on car sales that are irrelevant to EV's;
Maya Batres, a 34-year-old adviser for an environmental organization, bought a used Fiat 500e from a dealer in February 2022. The dealer, she said, didn’t know much about EVs but was happy to make the sale since she and her husband came prepared. But when it came time to sign the paperwork, the salesperson offered her a plan for oil changes and an extended warranty for a gas-powered car. “I knew we didn’t need that,” Batres said, laughing.
How do they get away with this? Well there are laws in the US that restrict sales of cars to dealers only, factory direct sales or sales through manufacturer owned shopfront are banned. In the end it's all about the money, they have a monopoly and they aren't willing to give that up, but EV's don't produce as much profit as ICE vehicles in the long run, so the incentive is to either not sell them, or to mark them up, sometimes as much as $10,000 over manufacturer RRP thus making them expensive, and at the same time negating the government tax credit people get for buying them;
At the same time, car dealerships make most of their overall profits from providing service for vehicles — not selling new cars. According to an analysis from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 16 percent of dealers’ gross profits came from new car sales, while 43 percent came from parts, labor and service. (The rest of the profits come from used car sales and financing and incentives.)
How did this happen and why is it so different for car manufacturers and dealers than for other goods and products that the manufacturer can sell direct to consumer, as I said all about the money of course!
Car sales are unlike any other commercial transaction in America. For most products — everything including shoes and iPhones — you can buy directly from the manufacturer or in dozens of other stores. Cars used to be the same: Before World War II, people bought personal vehicles at big-box department stores, from the manufacturers themselves and even at gas stations.
But in the 1940s and 1950s, dealerships — which were mostly single-family businesses — argued that the powerful automakers could undercut their sales and drive them out of business. Over the next two decades, dozens of states passed laws to protect dealers; many of them prevented manufacturers from selling directly to consumers.
So if EV's are overstocked and not selling in the US it really isn't because of the consumer, even with all these disincentives EV sales are at 7.9% of the total sales in the US, and that's a huge market, give the ability of manufacturers to sell EV's at RRP direct to customers without all the dealer bullshit and those number could go sky high very rapidly.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate- ... -ev-sales/