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As someone who has recently went through an EV shopping and purchase exercise, the dealership model has SO MUCH room for improvement. Every dealer was immediat
by jameslars 3y ago
As someone who has recently went through an EV shopping and purchase exercise, the dealership model has SO MUCH room for improvement.
Every dealer was immediately talking to me about financing options and specials before I even sat in any single car, let alone test drove one.
Of the 5 makes I test drove:
only 1 was willing to have the car configured with an actual single-pedal-driving experience (Volvo). Most were worried that my unfamiliarity with single-pedal-driving would lead to a bad test drive experience.
only 1 was willing to talk to me in clear terms about how route planning and mapping would work with the charging network. 2 different dealers told me I would have to download "an app off the appstore" for route planning & charging.
every dealer had some sort of dealership mark-up on the EV. Usually in the range of $1K - $3K. The Audi dealer was kind enough not to lie to us about the purpose, it was a dealership markup that he thought would be negotiable if it meant losing the sale.
Our Tesla test-drive experience - we showed up for our appointment, got some brief instructions / Q&A, and were handed a set of keys to tool around with for an hour. Another Q&A after, and no pressure to do anything else. We left without any purchase commitment, and made that separately online on our own time after more deliberation about the decision.
My partner and I went into this process sure we would pick a non-Tesla, it was the last car type we test drove after weeks of trying others. Every dealership turned us off in some way. That combined with the raw numbers (price of car, range, cargo space, towing capacity) it's no contest that Tesla has both the best EV and the best buying experience for an EV.