When it comes to electric vehicles, almost nothing is certain for America’s auto dealers. skynesher/iStock
LAS VEGAS — Jason Hooe is a Ford dealer who can’t wait to sell the electric F-150 to the young and hip of Bentonville, Ark. But the chargers are a problem.
Earlier this month, he paced the floor of America’s biggest auto dealer conference, talking to vendors who sell the new fueling system. He peppered them with questions, and no one persuaded him that today’s technology is ready to meet his customers’ needs later this decade.
“It’s the eight-track, and CDs are coming after it,” is how he described what he saw. “Do I buy these chargers, when I know at some point I’m going to have to phase them out?”
He was vexed, as were many of the dealers who attended the National Automobile Dealers Association conference in Las Vegas looking for answers about electric cars.
For the first time ever — and after a two-year Covid-19 pandemic hiatus that turned the automotive world on its ear — the theme of the auto dealer conference was electric vehicles. “We’re absolutely essential to bringing this product to market,” said Mike Stanton, NADA’s president.
Essential, perhaps, but also unsettled by the rapid change EVs are causing in the auto industry.
Dealers in 2022 find themselves in a stressful spot. Customers are clamoring for electric vehicles they don’t yet have in stock. The automakers promise that the cars are coming, sometime, but want dealers to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare for them right now. Dealers aren’t sure this crescendo of EV buyer interest will last, or how this brave new ecosystem is supposed to make them money.
“Everything that’s being introduced is version 1.0,” said John Malishenko, the operations manager of Germain Motor Co., a dealer group with locations in four states.
Hooe, 43, takes on the uncertainty with the can-do attitude one would expect from a guy who spends his days persuading people to buy a car.
His dealership, McLarty Daniel Ford Lincoln, is a mile from where Walmart Inc. is building its new 350-acre corporate campus. The grounds — dotted with lakes to control stormwater, with offices constructed of mass timber — are meant to draw young high-tech employees. Hooe imagines them strapping their knobby-tired bikes into the beds of the electric F-150s he will sell them for a bout on Bentonville’s trails (“the Aspen of mountain biking,” he calls them).
“I have to be the e-dealer of Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma,” he said.
But the conference also heightened his awareness of the electric vehicle’s shortcomings. He wants to anticipate the questions that his customers might ask — in fact, that they’re asking already.
For example, he learned at the conference that Ukraine and Russia are the sources of many of the critical raw materials that go into an EV battery. “Is there a built-in bubble here?” he wondered.
He frets about how long it takes to fill the battery, and how few charging stations there are. Will young families fall prey to criminals while waiting for electrons in the parking lot of some big-box store?
He knew something about EVs from the last in-person conference NADA held two years ago. But in the intervening time — as General Motors Co. pledged to go all-electric by 2035, and as Ford’s F-150 Lightning fired the imagination of truck drivers — the EV has undergone a revolution in the minds of auto dealers.
In the before times, EVs were the contraptions that dealers were obliged to sell because emissions-minded states like California told them they had to.
According to a 2019 survey of hundreds of dealerships by the Sierra Club, they often did a poor job. Salespeople were often unaware of the basics, like purchase incentives, and buried the electrics in the rear of the lot. But it might not have mattered. The few EVs available were often snapped up by eco-minded drivers who knew kilowatts and charging stations far better than the dealers did.
Now EVs are the talk of the town. Automakers are investing billions in EVs and redesigning their entire business models around them. No sooner does an automaker announce a new EV model than customers pile onto the waiting lists.But along with the EV promises come the ulcers, because no one can tell the dealers exactly what their role will be. ‘We’re battle-hardened’ “If you didn’t think car dealers are resilient, welcome to the last 750 days,” said Jason Stein.Stein, a veteran auto journalist and consultant, delivered this congratulatory nod as moderator of the marquee panel of the […]
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