Dealers Give EVs The Cold Shoulder, 49% Of Sales Teams Couldn’t Care Less

August 31, 2024

Nearly 50% of U.S. dealerships show zero interest for selling electric vehicles, study finds.
Dealership enthusiasm for EVs is particularly low in southern states, and even in California.
Even dealers in colder states worry about winter range issues, adding to their disinterest in EVs.

Despite automakers easing back on their EV push in the face of a slowdown in demand, car buyers have a greater choice of electric cars than ever before, and that choice is only going to grow over the next few years. But dealers are less than ecstatic at the prospect of selling all those new EVs, a new survey reveals.

An investigation into the attitudes of 250 big-shot dealerships across the country by CDK Global found that 49 percent of their sales teams weren’t excited at all about selling EVs. And that’s a national average figure. Dealers in some regions, such as the south, showed almost no interest in trying to move electrified metal.

Only 12 percent of dealers in Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and Kentucky said their sales teams were either moderately or very excited to sell EVs. But some northern dealers also appeared uninterested, and even in the Pacific region, which includes California, only 10 percent said they were very excited.

Some of the reasons given by sales teams for their lack of enthusiasm include the local geography that equates to long distances between towns with a patchy charging infrastructure. That makes it harder to persuade cars buyers that EVs are a viable alternative to ICE. And similarly, dealers in colder states said winter weather would make range worries even worse for customers.

Dealers Give EVs The Cold Shoulder, 49% Of Sales Teams Couldn’t Care Less — CDK Global

The bottom line is that dealers aren’t excited about selling EVs because they know that many drivers don’t want to buy one. But CDK says that the situation could be improved if both parties had a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of electric cars.

The study found that in the southern states that reported low excitement levels about selling EVs, only 24 percent of dealer sales teams said they were well trained to understand and sell electric vehicles. But in New England, where dealers were the most excited about selling EVs, 83 percent claimed to have been well trained.