Ford Dealership: You Can't Charge the Mustang Mach E at Home | Hacker News Reader

Ford Dealership: You Can't Charge the Mustang Mach E at Home

evbite.com

11 pointsianmobbs10 comments

So the headline is kinda click-baity in that someone at a dealership WRONGLY told the author "you can't change the Mustang Mach E at home" because apparently no one at any of the many Ford dealers called had a clue what they were talking about. Still an interesting read, but you can apparently charge your Mach E at home if you get one.

"Absolutely nothing but misinformation was sold to me. You can’t charge a Mustang Mach E at home, they can use Tesla Superchargers, it doesn’t have enough range, a plug-in hybrid is better, ect ect. Nothing of importance because it’s all, simply put, wrong."

Some car companies actually don’t want you to buy certain models, believe it or not! The Chevy Bolt was hard to get a hold of because Chevy just had it in their line up for regulatory reasons - they had no interest in actually selling and servicing these cars, it was more expensive than what they’d get for the sticker price, so it was purely to meet emissions regulations on paper. Certain luxury brands will not sell you the “base” model of a car because they don’t actually produce them, they’re just there to be on paper for marketing.

So in reading about this trouble with the Mach E, I can’t help but think that it’s just there to get you in to the dealership to buy the thing Ford actually wants to sell you; a Mustang GT or an F150.

Using a car salesman as your source of info is honestly pretty dubious for any car, especially one that the dealership isn't even going to see in person for at least a year. Ford does require dealerships to have a designated EV lead who takes some relevant training if the dealership wants to be "EV certified" by Ford. I wonder how many of these dealerships had that certification?

> Using a car salesman as your source of info is honestly pretty dubious for any car

You could pretty much replace both instances of "car" with anything and this would be equally true.

Conversation I had years ago:

$boss: Please do $job using the new $overpricedpieceofcrap.

me: Sorry, $overpricedpieceofcrap can't do $job.

$boss: But $guy1 and $guy2 said it would do $job.

me: $boss, those guys are salesmen.

And suddenly $boss was enlightened.

How long did it last?

Their job is still to sell cars.

You can fool some people some of the time but not all people all the time.

If people don't buy EV cars because dealerships anti-sell them, that's bad for car makers. Especially in Europe in China, where they have to sell a lot of EV cars or face gigantic fines.

If dealership continue straight up lying about EVs and people will indeed do an independent research, then they'll inevitable reach a conclusion that Tesla is a much better deal and will be amazed by Tesla's buying experience.

Ramping up EV sales to millions of units per year is a life-or-death situation for car makers in the next 10 years.

Dealerships sabotaging this effort will be a very significant problem.

I think this is more of the dealerships wanting to hold onto their business model, vs the Ford Company seeing which way the puck is going.

Most dealerships make most of their money from their service department. Considering most electric vehicles require much less service, this presents a very large problem.

The entire dealership model is going to get turned on it's head over the next decade.

A lot of things are. There will be a lot of job loss in these "middle men" industries.

This is not just Ford and there are more studies like this, both in US and in Europe.

See:

* https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/us-auto-dealers...

* https://www.coxautoinc.com/news/overcoming-electric-vehicle-...

* https://qz.com/1309799/car-dealers-are-erecting-barriers-for...

* https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2018/05/glib-car-dealer...

* https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/dealerships-dismiss-...

So many people are quick to enumerate all the challenges Tesla faces but here's a big one for all the (currently) top 10 car makers: making their frenemy dealership networks into EV sales forces as opposed to anti-sale force.

Currently the car makers might sell a volume of sub-50k per year even with hostile dealership force, just based on the interest generated by media in general and some advertising.

But it's going to be much harder to sell 500k cars a year if your salesforce is misinformed or even lying about EV and pushing ICE cars instead.

And fixing it is not as simple as telling dealerships to change because they are not owned by car companies. Those are independent businesses with their own agenda, negotiated contracts etc. Car makers might end up having to apply a lot of carrot, which will contribute to even more losses on EV cars.

Ugh, one of my pet peeves.

I love cars and cannot believe the ignorance of some salespeople. I've spoken with salespeople that knew next to nothing about the brand of car sold at their dealership.

It wouldn't take much effort to study the cars a bit. Doing so would make a great difference in the buying experience. Yet it's sadly lacking, sometimes.

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