Car Dealers Complain To President Biden About EVs And We Should Call Them Out For It

As electrek and other sources have pointed out, they made their “voice of the customer” statement in an appeal signed by about 4,000 dealers (actually 3,882 of the approximately 18,000) and sent to US President Joe Biden. The statement contains a few nuggets of fact but is mostly a collection of exaggeration, misrepresentation, and false information that is obviously a self-serving appeal to preserve their fossil fuel based profit centers (i.e. gasoline and diesel powered vehicles). It seems kind of like cigarette manufacturers appealing to the US Surgeon General to stop telling people the truth about how bad smoking cigarettes is. The dealer’s false information is easy to identify, for example: dealers do not speak for their customers, they speak for themselves and their interests. While they may have lots of insight from their interactions and exchanges of information with customers, and certainly there are many dealerships that do actively care about or look after the best interests of their customers, car dealerships and their associations simply do not represent customers and it is both arrogant and inappropriate for them to claim to speak on behalf of customers without first somehow having gotten their general agreement or support to do so. Second, dealerships most definitely do not represent “every” major brand in the US. Tesla, for one, is a major automotive brand in the US, selling 354,822 vehicles in 2022, more than Mercedes (350,949), BMW (332,388), VW (301,069), Mazda (294,908), and many others according to CarPro, and Tesla, famously, does not have any dealerships. So why are a large number of auto dealers signing on to an obviously disingenuous letter that is asking for the US government to slow down the transition to all-electric vehicles? The answer is simply that they are scared.

But what are US auto dealers scared of, and why? They are simply scared of losing money, or business, because the primary revenue stream of auto dealers is not sales, but rather service. Electric vehicles have far fewer parts and generally require much less maintenance (no oil changes, tune ups, emissions system repairs, belts and plugs and thermostats to replace, etc.). The fear of losing one's livelihood is certainly a very real, and rational thing to be afraid of in the face of what is happening: a market shift away from fossil fuel powered personal transportation. So it makes sense that car dealers are afraid. But the level of disingenuity in their statement is, to put it bluntly, gross. It is car dealers, not manufacturers or the government, that elected to tack on massive “market adjustments”, sometimes to the point of approximately doubling the price of in demand electric vehicles like the Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickup, as Motor Trend pointed out last year. So no, car dealers most certainly do not reflect the voice of the customer, they reflect their own voices. That isn’t to say all car dealers engage in this unscrupulous behavior, but it is absolutely those dealers that do engage in it that say the kinds of things we see in this statement. 

Finally, to be specific, the statement is riddled with pretense when it claims: “the majority of customers are simply not ready to make the change” because firstly car dealers simply haven’t spoken to or collected feedback from the majority of customers, and secondly the reality isn’t that customers are not ready; the reality is that customers are not able (since there is nowhere near enough EV supply, currently, for the majority of customers in the US to buy a new EV in the first place). While it is certainly true that many customers “are concerned about BEVs being unaffordable” (something that dealers are partly the cause of) and that “many do not have garages for home charging or easy access to public charging stations [and] are also concerned about the loss of driving range in cold or hot weather”, it is precisely the role of dealerships to help address these matters with customers by educating them and contributing to solutions that would allow more customers to transition to electric vehicles (for example by installing electric car charging stalls which they have been given allowances for by manufacturers and the government). These dealers too often choose not to do these things because they don’t see the value in doing so (it seems expensive, inconvenient, or a challenge to their profit models). So instead, they lie to us and say things like: “today’s current technology is not adequate to support the needs of the majority of our consumers'', which again is patently false and intentionally misinformative. For starters, the majority of their customers’ needs could easily be met by any new electric vehicle on sale today if by majority we are talking about the majority of American people which happen to drive approximately 40 miles per day, and the majority of single family homes that have garages (or carports), or perhaps the needs of consumers to take long road trips (made perfectly easy by anyone who has used the Tesla Supercharging Network, at least). The litany of pretense from these disingenuous dealers reaches its pinnacle when they assert that “many people just want to make their own choice about what vehicle is right for them”, as if the government were actually taking away choices (remember, the goal is to have the majority - not the totality - of new vehicles sold be electric (and plug-in hybrid) vehicles). People will still be able to buy new, and used, gas powered vehicles a decade from now even if the majority of new vehicles sold are EVs at that time. It is simply histrionic for car dealers to suggest otherwise. 

What do you think? Is the fact that emissions from the transportation sector are the single largest source of US carbon emissions a compelling enough reason for the US to aggressively pursue the adoption of plug-in, electric vehicles? Or are the dealerships on to something? Please leave your comments and questions below. 

Images courtesy of Ford and Hummer.

Justin Hart has owned and driven electric vehicles for over 15 years, including a first generation Nissan LEAF, second generation Chevy Volt, Tesla Model 3, an electric bicycle and most recently a Kia Sorento PHEV. He is also an avid SUP rider, poet, photographer and wine lover. He enjoys taking long EV and PHEV road trips to beautiful and serene places with the people he loves. Follow Justin on Torque News Kia or X for regular electric and hybrid news coverage.