It’s Hard To Sell Electric Cars If You Don’t Understand What They Are
It’s Hard To Sell Electric Cars If You Don’t Understand What They Are
Selling electric cars is hard enough but many dealers make that process harder by not training their sales staff.
Dealerships are very concerned about losing their main source of profits, the service department.
Its almost worse. The way dealerships have been done now awhile is the service department pays the bills. Its designed to not make profit but to allow the sales to be almost pure profit. This is a good thing as its the reason the prices are more reasonable than in the past and the service is good. Its pays the bills and acts as sorta an informal advertising, feet in the door type of thing. Its the way it should be. All the same it means that ultimately there will be fewer dealerships as their existence relies on service and the selling part really does not require large amount of stock. Really just need enough to show off the options.
I found that even if the salesperson is excited, there are still some knowledge gaps. I asked for my Ioniq to be charged to 100% on pickup (had a ways to drive), but found it was only 70% or so. The salesman said their charger was "too slow" (?) but they'd pay for the fast charge, so he came with me to the charger to authorize it.
My charge request was a few days prior to pickup, so in reality, they could've just plugged the 120v in the day before and it would've been full, and they didn't need to accompany me to the charger to start it if I just told them which to activate through the app when I was there.
Saying that, he was quite knowledgeable about their EVs, just obviously wasn't familiar with some of the more nuanced operational things.
Something more nuanced, like charging for example?
The nuances of charging I would say. I definitely think they should've known those things though.