- cross-posted to:
- electricvehicles@gearhead.town
- cross-posted to:
- electricvehicles@gearhead.town
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The biggest issue is that a lot of places are slow to have a dedicated EV certified bay. One it’s super expensive due to all the high voltage equipment. Then you’re down a bay that can pretty much only be used for ev’s. As far as I know Ford didn’t really do much to offset that cost. If the dealership is in an area where space is an issue the cost goes up even more. Not an issue with the large dealerships the small ones I can see not wanting to go with it.
My question is - is it waning demand for EV’s, or the fact that your average EV transaction price is $53,000. How are people supposed to afford that?
Ford has almost 3,000 dealerships, which employ more than 170,000 men and women across the United States.
these folks the dropouts dont want the expense of the conversion.
it seems that when it filters out that you can charge at Superchargers many buyers will re assess.
Late last month, Ford also announced that it would be delaying or canceling around $12 billion of its own planned investments into EVs amid waning demand,
Is that waning demand for EVs or waning demand for Ford EVs? Maybe if they’d build a decent economy EV (see: bolt) available for msrp people would actually buy the thing.
Waning demand compared to projections, which were all obviously bullshit from the beginning. That or CEOs are really that out of touch.
One of my local dealers is famously all in on Ford EV’s. The E Transit only gets 120 range…in the summer and it’s $50k. They have assloads of F150 Lightening but they are all $55k or higher. It’s so hard to justify when the gas equivalent is 30% cheaper out the door.
Is the E Transit in the US also a commercial panel van like here in Europe? I would think that 120 miles would be plenty for a lot of use cases for these things. Maybe less so in rural areas, though.
A panel van with only 120 miles of range would not work in the US.
But how are dealers supposed to gauge customers in poverty spec EVs? Think of the children!
The dealership model itself has a lot of modernizing and updates in general that need to happen…
Lol it is pretty brutal in a lot of ways.
Absolutely. If it costs Ford 10k to build a car, msrp is 20k, dealers should be getting these things for like 16k to sell for the 20.
Or manufacturers just need to supply the inventory for free and allocate a base sales commission for units sold.
If the MSRP is 20k, Ford is probably making $800/unit and the dealer is making $400. Unless the dealer can sell it for 25k…
Unfortunately, this is true.
Cars that normal people can afford have thin margins.
The fat pandemic days of product scarcity and low interest rates are gone. Cheap cars will be back, but not without a lot of kicking and screaming first.
You’d think they could make a decent profit on a bare bones electric car once they go more mainstream. Just an electric motor, stereo and power windows and the basic safety features. Don’t need all the other fancy stuff.
Nobody buys bare bones cars, at least in the states. The value proposition just isn’t there. Most people will go used as the feature set is better for your money.
“bare bones cars” is one of the memes on this subreddit, along with “le manuel wagon”. Nobody wants them, that’s why they don’t make them.
I wouldn’t be upset if every dealership in the world’s insurance suddenly lapsed and mysteriously burned to the ground. There is no reason there should be a middle-man in a car buying process.
The actual buildings don’t even need to go away. Turn them into delivery centers and maintenance/repair (which is already there). I want to order a car online, get ALL the paperwork finalized online, then go in to review/sign a couple documents, get my keys and leave.
And who is going to turn them into these barebones delivery centers? Dealerships are all independently owned and have to pay rent on a substantial amount of land beyond just the building itself. No automaker on the planet has the spare cash to buy all of their dealers out. With certain exceptions like Ferrari of course. But why would they want to deal directly to the public?
Dealers make 10x the sale amount on service and repairs. Why the fuck would they want to sell cars that require almost no service? lol
For real. Car dealerships are set up in such a way where the almost benefit off screwing over unsuspecting customers that come in for services.
Why in the world would they want to support something that directly eats their profits?
The markup on an oil change alone is astronomical.
they DO benefit from that, that’s their entire business model, no almost about it
damn so Toyota actually made a good decision not to announce putting all their egg in one basket
they play the long game, it’s been working out well for them
They still put their eggs in one basket. Hybrids.
They do not have a serious BEV product. I do think they could probably put one together in a pinch, but they aren’t positioned if they’re suddenly was a huge shift in market demand (like, heaven forbid, a world war in the Middle East or something).
They didn’t put all their eggs in one basket, they’ve still got a couple different types of hybrids AND regular gas cars AND are starting to come out with battery EVs like the BZ4X or whatever cat-across-the-keyboard thing they named it. That’s at least three baskets!
When when Toyota wanted to enter the luxury market, they spent a billion dollars and came up with the LS400. And it was perfect right out the gate.
The bz4x does not show the same level of serious intention that the LS400 had. It’s borderline a compliance car.
The USA is a net exporter of oil these days due to fracking and oil shale, market conditions are very different to when OPEC controlled the entire market
Yet our prices are still determined by the global price.
yeah, oil market is really complicated, we sell and buy back and resell and rebuy and stockpile and pull from the stockpile and cycle in and out and all kinds of other bullshit, it’s really fuckin stupid tbh
I am going to try to link an article about why this is but IDK if it’ll run afoul of the various rules about links and politics here. It’s a Salon article about someone who went to the NADA conference to see what dealers were doing with the EV transition and what they saw there.
if it gets nuked or something, let’s just say that a Certain Political Ideology common in car dealership owners is EXTREMELY Anti-EV on an institutional level. There’s an anecdote about someone the author talked to near the end that said that dealers are going as far as declining to sell fords any more at all rather than do the EV transition to Ford’s standards. Grim stuff.
Great read and an interesting look.
yeah the whole aspect of the culture is a little… distressing lol
Haha yeah I was trying to be diplomatic. They’re fucking insane.
Add it to the list of reasons the dealership sales model needs to go.
nooooooooooo kiddin
a Certain Political Ideology common in car dealership owners is EXTREMELY Anti-EV on an institutional level.
I wonder what will happen when this ideology wins the next elections.
There is a good chance the only EV brand remaining will be the one whose CEO solidly supports said ideology.
honestly? even if the the last guy wins next time (I’d say his name but I don’t know if it trips automod to delete this for politics) and decides to outlaw electric cars, I don’t think he’d carve out an exception for Tesla, he seems to not like Elon very much, which is extremely funny to me tbh