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Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

I think this is really GM's fault mixed with the broken dealership model.

I went in to ask about them early on and the people knew nothing. I was confused by ads about them that talked about 'range' I thought maybe the car couldn't run only on the gas generator and it just extended it or something.

The dealers were anti-selling them and directly hostile.

In the end it turned out just to be stupid advertising - I'm not sure why you'd talk about a 'range' when you can fill up and immediately keep going, it's misleading.

These companies have no hope against Tesla - the superchargers are excellent.

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When we purchased our 2019 E-tron early last year and the Audi dealership was also openly hostile about the sale. They did everything to try to put us into a different (gas) car. Manufacturers would be well served to sell their Evs directly.

I think the big reason for this is most dealers know there's little maintenance cost on EVs, which is where they make their money. With our Nissan Leaf, it's a struggle finding a dealer that even has an EV mechanic, and the ones that don't won't touch it if they don't have one.

With that said though, I've found that sales not knowing anything about the cars they sell to be the trend of late. Even with ICE cars I've bought lately, the sales people have known virtually nothing about the car that I couldn't read on the sticker.

There's a political element too (though Elon's Twitter behavior has helped reduce this somewhat - I suspect maybe intentionally).

I lived in Western New York suburbia at the time and there was a strong anti-ev anti-liberal tribal sentiment that seemed to be contributing.

>I think the big reason for this is most dealers know there's little maintenance cost on EVs, which is where they make their money.

Bingo - the real rub for existing car manufacturers - their existing dealer networks.

Then again from the frequent Tesla repair horror stories I see it seems Tesla would do well to court a lot more dealers/repair options.

Sadly, I agree. Being an engineer, the lesson to me was that marketing and sales teams are critical. I like to think that "a great product will sell itself", but for a high dollar item like a car that's just not true.

I think the lesson they took away was "these don't sell" when the lesson they should have learned is "the dealerships are an existential threat to our business".

Even now, they've bought Cruise and relegated them to one trim level on one model? There's no hope for them. That tech should be default on every model in their entire fleet.

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