back
6 comments
Yes I think there's a real innovators' dilemma here for traditional automakers with dealer networks. Dealers make most of their money on servicing vehicles, not selling them. And EVs require almost no servicing.
I bought a used Audi etron a couple months ago. Agent was going to try to sell me a service plan and realized none of them apply to electric :) The downstream fanout of the auto industry is huge…
There's still brakes, suspensions, tires, etc. to sell to EV buyers. Especially when EVs are so heavy that they have more wear on many of these.
> There's still brakes, suspensions, tires, etc. to sell to EV buyers.

The brakes last a lot longer because of regen, everything else applies but is pretty marginal, although I had to pay BMW $500 to replace a tire on my i4 because of a nail. I could have shopped around for that I guess.

If you don't use your brakes and just regen all the time, you run the risk of having your brakes rust.

https://nrsbrakes.com/blogs/supporting-articles/the-unused-b...

Yes, you are encouraged to slam on your brakes at least once a month to get the rust off. I live on the west coast (rain but low humidity and hardly any snow), so its less of an issue.
You'd think with all that electronics it would be smart enough to use real brakes every now and then. The plug in hybrid Prius runs the gas engine every 100 miles or so.
First read your owner's manual to see if it says anything about this.

My EV for example has a brake cleaning mode that turns off regeneration for approximately the next 10 times you use the brakes.

Using that is probably going to be safer than slamming on the brakes.

iirc some OEMs will automatically apply the brakes lightly during regular driving from time to time to counteract this
I know Rivian does this.
What percent of people go to the car dealer for tires?
We recently got a tire at the dealer. My wife got a flat while she was trying to get to work. The car comes with roadside assistance, and the "easy path" was to let them tow it to the dealer.

We could've done the work to find a private shop to change the tire and redirect the tow truck there, but it takes effort, my wife gets intimidated by car stuff, and she was busy with some work meetings (which she took at the roadside).

In the end it cost us an extra $100, but probably saved us $1000 of marriage counseling :) That's ROI !

Dunno the percentages but I see them advertise tires, so not zero at least. Saves you from a separate run if you have them installed during service.
but nothing compared to the oil changes, filter changes, as well as an ICE having multiple moving parts, so more chances for something to break.
That looks alien to me. Here, in europe, the usual thing it's go to your car workshop of trust. And they know where and how pick the parts and service your vehicle. Some car workshops could be "oficial" for a car maker, and it's where you should go when your car is new and under warranty period.
The dynamics in the US are different for a reason: Car dealerships are independently owned due to laws preventing car manufacturers from directly selling cars to consumers.

This means multiple dealers (of the same car brand) compete with each other to sell you a car, thus driving their margin down. They try to make it back by selling you add-on packages and financing at the time of sale, ongoing service relationships, and handling warranty/recall issues (paid by the corporate brand).

Ford did try to make it up to them by offering a bevy of aftermarket add-ons for the Lightning that were sold through the dealerships. As a consumer, I wanted them to keep the EV and ICE versions as similar as possible, with the hope that parts would be cheaper and easier to find.
Also dealers are one of the most reliable GOP funding sources. The GOP does not like EVs.
I doubt that. I suspect there are virtually no customers who step into a dealership unsure if they want to buy EV or ICE.
They seem to be flooded on dealership lots and are not selling whatsoever. OEMs force dealers to take the crap vehicles if they are to get the good ones. You have a vehicle that started off as a hard sell to the crowd that normally buys the vehicle and then you make it so the price is astronomical...forget the dealer reluctance, what did you think was going to happen?

[1]:https://youtu.be/F0SIL-ujtfA?t=532

Yeah I mean the obvious problem is that consumers specifically want to buy new ICE cars.
They will buy both ICE and EVs at the right price. I don't think Ford sells anything at the right price currently. But the Lightning was a mistake at that price.
I have a conspiracy theory take on traditional manufacturers being so anti-EV.

Basically the primary differentiator between car companies and the primary barrier to entry in the combustion vehicle business is the engine, especially in the US. Look at the marketing, horsepower and torque are always the topline numbers. Zero to sixty and quarter mile drag races are the favored metrics. Each company spent decades perfecting the engines and the majority of the engineering effort goes into them. Even the transmissions get second fiddle status.

But now EVs come along and the electric motors are commodity parts that are already well optimized. There's little one company can do to make the motor significantly better. Battery tech is cutthroat and also largely outside of the car company's scope, although Tesla does more than other car companies with their megafactories and experiments with oversized cells. If EVs become popular there's little to stop competition from sprouting up everywhere and killing profitability for the legacy auto manufacturers.

That's one way of seeing it, but the fact is that automobile parts are already nearly commodity parts. The wall that stops automaker upstarts in their tracks is the need for safety testing and approval from the US DOT.

Even if you had the chutzpah to get all of the materials together for a fleet of vehicles, you have to spend big cash and grease a lot of palms to get a vehicle you make certified. It takes years and millions of dollars to get to the 1st sellable vehicle.

This is a portion of why BYD, for instance, isn't selling in America.

There are other reasons of course, but one of them is the millions and millions of dollars you're putting at risk just to potentially be told "No" by the government.

https://www.atic-ts.com/north-america-motor-vehicle-componen...

Do you think the DOT should have a X program similar to the FAA that allows manufacturers that sell less than some number of cars a year (maybe 100?) to bypass most of the testing but require buyers to sign a disclaimer that they know the vehicle has not been fully tested for safety?

Also, I don't think it is the cost of DOT testing that is the primary barrier to entry for a company with three quarters of a trillion dollars in revenue. The domestic car manufacturers are never going to stand for a repeat of the Japanese invasion of the 70s that nearly bankrupted all of them simply because they were not listening to the customers and trying to sell vehicles that were too big and too expensive. Everyone knows what would happen if some bare bones $15,000 EV with a 250 mile range and ample supply appeared in the market.

Well, that is why I say One of the reasons, lol. US Automobile companies are actively lobbying the government to protect them from chinese emergence in America.

They're actively scamming americans by artificially limiting their choices, raising prices, and calling it freedom.

And yes, I think there should be some loopholes or programs to get small numbers of vehicles made by small companies, but I also know that insuring a car with such small numbers would likely be a nightmare for the owners.

> Ford seemed to understand this and attempted a direct sale program for EVs, but they canceled it due to dealer pushback.

Why didn't they just do it anyways? Dealerships seem like a pointless middleman, but I know absolutely nothing about what leverage they have. Self-driving cars can not come fast enough

Because dealerships are the automakers' real customers, at least right now.

You don't buy a vehicle from Ford; your local Ford dealership buys a large number of vehicles from Ford, and then you buy one of those.

Yes, an argument could be made that eliminating the dealership keeps the same customer base while eliminating the middleman (see also: Carvana), but now you have a lot more cost and logistics (shipping individual cars to individuals' homes, for example, rather than shipping truckloads to a single well-known spot) and unless you're willing to do the Carvana/CarMax thing of offering a 7-day return window (which adds even more cost and logistics and risk), the average American customer won't feel as comfortable buying a vehicle sight-unseen from across the country as they would if they could sit in the thing while a salesperson pitches it to them.

That means you're taking on whole new category of cost and risk, while assuming that you won't lose any of your incoming revenue.

That's kinda a big assumption, and the major established/legacy/whatever-you-call-them automakers aren't known for having a high risk appetite.

Or the manufacturers just run what look exactly like traditional dealerships, just without the stupid crap that no customers want. It can’t be that hard or expensive. It’s a parking lot and a small office building.
Every state in the country prohibits car manufacturers from competing with their franchised dealerships. At the minimum the manufacturer would have to stop using dealerships altogether. And about a third of states only have narrow exemptions that only apply to EV-only manufacturers or manufacturers that never had franchises at the time the law had passed.
Extensive regulatory capture -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_US_dealership_disputes