Yeah… actually reading the article, it sounds like it is mostly annecdotes about salespeople who are bad at their jobs.
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.
I don’t know the BMW lineup, but that sounds like someone skimmed the literature and conflated the max speed of a BEV with the electric range of a PHEV’s battery.
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.
Limited supply and normal dealer upselling.
The one annecdote that DOES seem “right” to me is
Dealers may have less economic incentive to sell electric vehicles. Buzz Smith, a former Chevrolet car 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. A gas car, he said, might take no more than an hour in a single visit to sell, yielding a tidy commission.
But for electric vehicles, “it was usually four visits, an hour each, before they would buy the EV,” Smith said. Customers want to make sure they understand the technology, how to charge it and more. “So I’m volunteering to take a 75 percent pay cut — and no salesman wants to do that.”
And that is 100% accurate. People (think they) understand ICE cars and generally know what car they want. When I bought my current car, I had it narrowed down to two vehicles. It was go in, do a test drive, and then head to the other dealer. End of the day I had my car. The extent of my conversation with the salesperson was to ask about the headlights and it ended up just being “So can I just turn the car on, turn it off, and check if the lights are still on?”. Because salespeople are generally idiots if it isn’t the top of the line model.
With BEVs? I am the kind of person who does his own research. The extent of my conversation with a dealer when I tried to buy one last year was “So can I give you my number to call me when you have this or next year’s model in stock? No? Okay…”. But people are going to have questions.
Which gets to the other aspect. Dealerships have been spoiled with the past few years of shortages and low interest rates. Cars sold themselves and people would gladly pay insane mark-ups for the luxury of being able to buy one. But shortages are mostly a thing of the past and interest rates are insane. So people aren’t going to run around with a sack of cash and hope they can finish the sale before anyone realizes they only paid 150% on the undercoating.
They are going to have questions and need to be told why one car is better than another.
And when all you care about is sales per hour? Why waste time?
As an aside. Apparently the latest “hip” way to shop for cars is to use a Broker website. Similar to the logic of Carmax back in the day where you are paying a bit more for the peace of mind of not having to deal with a negotiation. But, because of insane upselling from dealers, it actually comes out comparable or even cheaper. Found out about them in between wanting to buy a BEV and deciding to wait until the '24 or '25 models for a few improvements, but from limited testing, it actually seems legit.
The thing about the i3 episode here that I find particularly baffling is that anyone who is into cars at all, which hopefully includes someone who sells them for a living, should know that James May is a prominent owner of one. Yes, that James May, the “oh cock” guy, famous for along with the other two driving and talking about many, many cars on the television. He personally own(ed) one. He’s done multiple films and videos on it, notwithstanding the segment from their Grand Tour show which included his going head to head with a Golf and has (I just checked) 2.7 million views on Youtube.
There should be no person on Earth in a position to look at or sell a BMW i3 who doesn’t know every single little thing about it.
Top Gear got cancelled, again. It is not the powerhouse it maybe used to be around the time they had Matt LeBlanc as a host because whatshisface assaulted someone over a sandwich and got cancelled for a few years? Hell, I assume there are a significant number of people who just know it as “some show ymfah made fun of” at this point.
Also, I am pretty sure the average person buying a BMW just wants a luxury car and doesn’t give a shit about car culture. I don’t know the models well enough, but I assume if you asked that salesperson about their SUV or their super luxury sedan, they would know every single inch of it.
“Car culture” people are not going to be asking the dealer questions about specs. Well, I know a guy who would but only because he wants to show that he knows more than they do.
Which is kind of the real point of it. Dealerships want to sell volume. Spending time answering every single question is not volume. I think they very much need to recalculate that, but, for the period this likely happened, “What is the range on this car” is comparable to “So I know this says I should use 89 octane gas. But can I just use 87 octane gas? I know they are different but one is a lot cheaper and…”. Where the response to both is to just half-ass and face them the moment you see a new customer.
Like, I am sure there are dealerships that specifically cater to the kind of customer who NEEDS their salesperson to be a “car guy” as it were. But the vast majority do not.
As for “they have 2.7 million views on youtube”. The OfflineTV video where they cooked food with some streamer and (Anime with) Alvin Zhou has 1.3 million views. Normie Jesus (aka “Charlie” aka “Moist Critical”)'s latest drama commentary video has 1.9 million views in 19 hours. 2.7 million is really not the accomplishment you think it is, relative to the current day celebrities.
Hell, the ymfah “Top Gear” episode for Dark Souls 2 is at 1.2M views.
Ty for a good breakdown. As tradition jalopnik using shitty titles to drum up drama. When the reality is less dramatic. But should be noted that dealerships have been scalping with markups left and right.
Apparently the latest “hip” way to shop for cars is to use a Broker website.
I’ve been using a car broker for a decade now and can confirm that it is indeed the best way to buy a car. You can tell them generally what you’re looking for, they’ll line up 3 or 4 models for you to compare. You go to one location to check them all out at the same time, and they handle everything else. You never have to go into a dealership at all. It’s amazing.
Fact is that a dealership shouldn’t be a REQUIREMENT to sell a car.
I thought these are the ‘Free Market Capitalism’ sort of people. What are they afraid of?
As with most things, “free market” is what they demand when they don’t get have access to the market or can’t command the whole market.
Once they have access or enough of a percentage to set the prices, suddenly the best thing is high barriers to entry and whatever else will help them maintain inelastic demand.
What are they afraid of?
Being forced to sell less profitable product. Somebody has to do it. But they’ll be damned if it’s going to be them.
Not only is there a lower margin, but the fact that EVs are lower maintenance means they will get less money from a customer coming into their service department. Not that it even needs to get to anything as farsighted as that when a sales guy gets a larger commission for an ICE vehicle. They aren’t going to spend time learning about a product that gets them paid less, they are going to say whatever it takes to steer a customer towards whatever gets them the biggest payday.
One of my favorite examples of ignorant dealers saying stupid shit was a dealer telling a would be customer that they weren’t able to bring EVs into their service dept because they have to be kept in a bomb proof shelter in case the battery explodes. This wasn’t even a sales guy, it was a manager in a service dept, at a dealer that (supposedly) sells and services EVs.
Blog repost of a portion of a washington post story, found here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2023/11/09/car-dealerships-ev-sales/
or web archive version: https://web.archive.org/web/20231111005720/https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2023/11/09/car-dealerships-ev-sales/
But please subscribe to new sources you use if you can, good journalism isn’t free.
Yeah, I thought about directly linking to WaPo, but people always complain about paywalls. I do post WaPo content on Lemmy at times, great outlet
No worries, totally get it, just thought I’d offer up the direct link to the full story too for those who want it.
Washington Post is currently $4/4-weeks or $40/year USD for unlimited articles.
Hopefully people will wise up and stop preventing consumers from buying direct.
More like “Market Adjustment”
Thats opposite my experience.
It seems this is mostly applying to rural dealerships that sell American brands
Some dealerships are better than others, but in my experience of buying a car in the last year, most dealerships oblivious to EVs and the majority of the rest are hostile. Even if dealerships know anything about EVs, many are looking at the lack of EV maintenance and see disappearing recurring income for oil changes, etc
