Batteries Included: Mastering BEV Sales

Buying a battery-electric vehicle can be puzzling.

So can selling one if a car dealership salesperson lacks product knowledge and is more comfortable selling conventional vehicles with internal-combustion engines.

WardsAuto asked three auto retailing experts for their insights on successfully selling BEVs (usually referred to simply as EVs).

First, Despite naysayers’ griping, EVs are here to stay. The market is in a state of flux, though. EV sales growth currently is slower than predicted. But it’s not stopped at a red light.

According to Wards Intelligence, U.S. EV sales climbed from 238,540 units in 2020 to 459,424 in 2021 to 747,982 in 2022 to 1,164,638 in 2023, a year that saw total vehicle deliveries at 15.5 million.

For the first three quarters of this year, 903,645 EVs were sold.

With customer interest growing, it behooves dealerships to get their sales staff up to speed in selling EVs.

Prospective first-time EV buyers have lots of questions on issues such as range, recharging and battery durability. Accordingly, showroom staffers should readily know the answers.

Here’s what our three experts had to say about EV selling tips:

Ed Roberts, chief operating officer, Bozard Ford Lincoln in St. Augustine, FL

There is a struggle selling EVs. Part of it involves salesperson compensation. At some dealerships, EVs are the least-commissioned vehicles on the lot. That should change.

It’s not always a quick sale because customers can have a lot of questions.

We’ve added 30 chargers at our dealership. Part of the expansion was so salespeople driving EVs can recharge for free. (We found) 20% of the staff is driving EVs. Because of that, they are comfortable talking to customers about EVs.

Many of today’s EV shoppers are beyond the early-adopter phase. They have questions that the tech-savvy first wave didn’t have. If a salesperson doesn’t have the answers, it hurts customer trust.

Trust is vital. One study indicated that the buyer of an internal-combustion vehicle on average shops at 1.4 dealerships. For EV buyers, the average is four dealership visits. In my opinion, that goes to the trust issue.

We discuss range, charging infrastructure and the fact that people rarely drive so much in a day that they will run out of power at the end of it.     

We’ve got to focus more on ownership experience. It means taking care of the customer through the sales process and beyond to the service process.

Our dealership also has tons of opportunities selling used EVs, because most dealers wholesale EV trade-ins rather than retail them.

We dance in the EV market. Are we great in it? No. But we want to become great. It’s a huge opportunity to gain market share if we do it right, and properly train salespeople.

EV durability is also a selling point. We’ve seen EVs with 150,000 miles (241,500 km) on the odometer, and they are only coming in for tire replacements.

Dealers know how to sell, and they are the only ones doing EV demonstration drives. What’s been successful for us in selling EVs is putting butts in the seats.           

Matthew Phillips, CEO of Car Pros, a dealer group with stores in California and Washington state.

We’re seeing less of an EV customer that fits into a box. We’re starting to see EVs go mainstream, which means you see all sorts of buyers.

But there are essentially two types. One consists of people who want to buy an EV. They are pretty educated on EVs and the programs. You just have to come off as competent and give them good service like you would any customer.

Then you have a large part of the population for whom an EV is a good choice, but they don’t know enough about them to immediately buy one.

They are going to go to a franchised dealer for the answers, not to a brand with direct-to-consumer sales over the internet. This is our opportunity to win the EV race.

It’s never about selling people products that aren’t good for them. It’s about helping people understand the options they have and what’s the best fit, whether it's an ICE vehicle, hybrid or EV.

That’s where franchised dealers can show the superiority of their system.

How hard it is to deal with (casual) EV shoppers depends on how much your dealership and sales staff are prepared by knowing the answers to the questions and knowing the vehicle’s features and benefits.

If you know that and know how the government tax credits work, it’s not any harder to sell an EV than any other car.

If the salesperson and the customers don’t know much about EVs, that’s a problem. If the salesperson doesn’t know much about EVs, and the customer does, that’s another problem.

The OEMS are working hard with training and getting everyone up to speed. Kia has done clinics in major markets. The pace will be set by a dealership’s senior management. If it is important to them, it should be important to everyone.

But if the owner or general manager doesn’t care about EVs or doesn’t know the difference between a level 1 and level 3 charger, to think that their people are somehow going to get this information and use it unlikely.

Mark Schienberg, president of the Greater New York Auto Dealers Assn.

Selling EVs is very different, and although sales currently aren’t as high as predicted at this point, there’s still an interest.

At the New York auto show (which the Greater New York dealers group hosts) 140,000 attendees took EV test drives. For many of them, it was their first time in one. It was a learning experience.

It’s important to bring consumers along the way by helping them feel comfortable about purchasing something other than a vehicle with an internal-combustion engine.        

Education by the dealership sales staff is huge. The experience of driving an EV is huge.

The dealership challenge is to make sure the salesperson is fully familiar with the product. That takes training. We do some of that at our association’s educational center.

I can understand some salespersons’ situations: It’s a lot quicker to sell an ICE vehicle. But two- or three-year EV leasing is a benefit for some on-the-fence consumers because they aren’t locked into outright ownership.

Salesperson-customer discussions should cover service, recharging issues and how much money the customer potentially saves in energy costs with an EV vs. a gasoline-powered car. A broader discussion might get into EV-related lifestyle.

But a lot more work needs to be done. Dealers say they are ready and willing to sell something that sells. But they wonder whether there will be enough customers at the end of the day. They are thrilled to sell EVs — if EVs are selling.