They Want to Be Gatekeepers: Car Dealers Are Stopping Customers from Buying EVs
jalopnik.com
jalopnik.com
Car dealers being slimy is something of a cliche, but that cliche is well earned.
Of course change is scary for incumbents. Change leads to a disruption of the status quo, and opens the door to new players. Some will no doubt resist, others will embrace, invest, and grow.
I'm sure it's easy to find dinosaur dealers. I suspect there are also progressives working to take their place.
- Upton Sinclair
Not much you can swindle out from a customer if all that the car has is brake fluid, AC unit, a motor, a battery and chips.
I also suspect that diagnostic systems or helpers will allow regular users to troubleshoot their car themselves, and become more immune to swindling by service centers.
No wonder they dont want to sell EVs
You have a point, but the world has to move on from oil.
EVs are heavy. Their weight eats through tires, and reduces the service life (or increases cost) of suspension components. The battery in my mother's Chevy Volt is doing fine at 10 years and 100k+ miles, but there's no telling what condition it will be in at year 15 or 20 - both reasonable benchmarks for durability that no mainstream EV has reached yet.
> I drive a 23 year old car, and the only thing I've had to replace that I wouldn't have to replace on an EV is a timing belt.
We're discussing things you have to replace in 23 years of owning an ICE car that you don't have to replace on an EV.
Off the top of my head, EVs only need regular maintenance for the air filters, tires, and wiper blades, maybe power steering fluid?
ICE needs the same plus oil changes, belts, engine coolant, fuel filters, head gaskets, more brake fluid replacements, muffler/exhaust repair, oil filters, spark plugs, transmission fluid, water pumps, etc.
Each one of those is a lost sales opportunity for EV purchases.
Cars need wheel alignments.
Steering components need regular maintenance, as does the environmental system (A/C, heat, filter).
In a Tesla (and probably other EVs), there's a coolant loop for the battery and power/control electronics. That can break and needs maintenance.
Lights burn out and need replacing.
An EV battery needs to be replaced, which is expensive. And do not let it get flooded, as a couple in Scotland recently found out.
Hertz recently said that maintaining a Tesla costs more than an ICE.
Biggest complain about breaks in EVs I have read about is that they rust from non usage
>Lights burn out and need replacing.
With LEDs this is a non issue, even for gas cars for years.
> EV battery needs to be replaced, which is expensive.
We are talking 300k miles+ on somewhat modern batteries, 1 million miles+ for lfp most gas cars are long dead at this point
And EVs are still usable, also you might need to charge them more often(yes some gas cars can go longer, but you often need a transmission rebuild + expensive repair in the motor)
>Hertz recently said that maintaining a Tesla costs more than an ICE
I would assume that's through the added collisions damages you have on rentals, but afaik there was no data published here
Still, from a maintance standpoints... LEDs are great as a good implementation needs to only be changed after an incident
That is regular maintenance.
My main point - which I did not express well - is 'maintenance' should be the issue, not just routine maintenance. This break, and need to be fixed.
Regarding Hertz, a news article at https://www.businessinsider.com/hertz-slows-down-electric-pl... summarizes it as:
> Hertz said the company found that repairing damage to an electric car can cost around twice as much as fixing similar issues on a comparable internal-combustion-engine vehicle. Routine maintenance, however, costs less, the company said. EVs don't need oil changes and are generally simpler to maintain than internal-combustion vehicles.
I am also aware that is Tesla-specific, and may not apply to other EVs. However, it still does not mean that one can say something is an EV therefore it must be easier to maintain than an ICE, if only because the latter has spent a lot more money over the last century to reduce those costs.
Having the option to do a, what amounts to an underside car cleaning is not really a counter argument to that point
The numerous faulty LED signal & brake lights I see on the road say otherwise.
The whole regeneration breaking + breaklights is really badly regulated & implemented in a ton of cars.
But might be wrong, might be they keep burning up in your climate.
It's certainly not a problem with the LEDs themselves, but with the power or control circuitry. But, just like how it's rarely the LEDs themselves that have failed when your LED lightbulb stops working, the end result is that it's broken anyway and so needs repair.
I see more broken LED lights than broken old-style lights, but that may be because there are more of them on the road now. I don't know what the percentage failure rate is between the two.
Interestingly, years ago when stoplights were being replaced with LED versions, almost all of them would begin exhibiting similar failures within weeks of installation. That seems to have been fixed now -- I rarely see malfunctioning stoplights anymore. So perhaps cars will catch up to that standard.
Are you in an high heat/humidity market?
Or might just be some producer which don't have a big market share in Germany.
Can't find data on this case. Had hope the German tüv would go into failure statistics, but nothing.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2023/11/09/...
I loved this passage:
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. That markup added “insult to injury,” Richards said. He ended up buying a Tesla Model Y.
Yes: treat customers like morons, and they will spend their $ elsewhere. Keep it up, and that will only speed the demise of EV-hater car dealerships.
I also have to laugh because the UAW is against EVs (this has been stated many times by the president). The cars require less people to build them.
Have you actually tried one, or just sneered at them from a distance?