I test the EV experience at 13 car dealerships

Includes undercover clips and video reactions as I play an EV newbie

Hello, I’m Tom Riley, and welcome back to The Fast Charge, a British EV newsletter.

My only story today… I go undercover as an EV newbie at 13 car dealerships across West London to test the experience. In particular, how dealers act when you don’t have off-street parking.

Below, I’ve highlighted the investigation I undertook and my top three observations and recommendations.

I’ve also published a YouTube video that includes my secret recordings inside the showrooms, as well as my immediate response to each dealership I visited. It’s 30 minutes, so maybe watch it in bites.

As always, if you have any comments or feedback, please reply to this email or use the links below. And if you’ve not done so already, consider upgrading to paid - though this edition is free.

What I uncovered playing a ‘mystery EV buyer’ at 13 car dealerships across West London

Background: At every event I visit or person I talk to at the moment, when discussing the challenge of increasing EV adoption, everyone always agrees on the same thing: affordability is the problem. Whether it’s car brands calling for incentives to arouse consumer interest, or genuine EV advocates hoping for energy price reform so we can lower the cost at the plug. But none of that is happening, despite the endless pleas.

The challenge is… Right now, we are on the cusp of a situation where we’ll need to rapidly start getting more of the ‘mass’ driving population into EVs. However, while many of these will indeed benefit from driveways, making home charging possible and thus saving you hundreds of pounds each year. Unfortunately, some 40% do not have this option. And in cities, that percentage grows even higher - in Greater London, 60% don’t have driveways.

So, that’s it then? No honeybun, not quite. Because it is still possible to own an EV and only have public charging. Increasingly, many on-street chargers provide cheaper off-peak tariffs, and new local hubs are popping up everywhere. Given the average mileage of the typical household, with just a bit of knowledge and reassurance, there’s no reason it couldn’t work for you. Importantly, while still saving money against owning a petrol.

Then why isn’t that happening? Why are groups like Cenex now predicting we’ll only have 7.5 million EVs on UK roads by 2030, whereas two years ago, that was close to 13 million. Clearly, the Tories amending the ZEV mandate didn’t help. And Labour’s recent changes have further weakened the situation.

However, big policy isn’t the be-all end-all. In every survey from here to Timbuktu, I guarantee ‘word-of-mouth’ will always come out numero uno on a list of ‘what sources do you trust’. It’s in this view that I decided to undertake a little investigation looking at what communication is happening on the ground, directly with consumers.

My investigation: Given my proximity to many brand dealerships, selling both new and used vehicles, over this past weekend, in the blistering heat, I took it upon myself to go undercover playing the role of an EV newbie. I kept my story the same with each visit. This was… “My partner and I are considering our next car, and we’re looking at going electric. However, given we can’t home charge, is that a dealbreaker?” Follow-up questions included… Where can I learn more about charging near me? And… Would you recommend we wait or try something else?

I visited 13 dealerships in total. The original plan was 15, though as you’ll see in the video, two of them were closed (BMW + MG). The ones I visited were:

• Honda

• Volvo

• Volkswagen

• Stellantis

• BYD

• Tesla

• Hyundai

• Renault

• Toyota

• Audi

• Mercedes-Benz

• KIA

• Omoda Jaecoo

I didn’t visit… Ford. This was on account of the nearest dealer to me being miles away, and sadly, I’m not currently able to drive on account of epilepsy (boring). Likewise, I didn’t visit Jaguar Land Rover. My reasoning here is that they seem a bit all over the place with their EV strategy right now. Are they doing it, are they delayed, or are they not? I thought it would be unfair on staff to visit them - not saying I won’t in the future.

My findings… 🚗⚡️

To see my live and quite raw reactions to each dealership experience, please watch the YouTube video above 👆. If you’ve read the above, you can probably skip forward five minutes. Below, I’ve summarised my top three observations based on the whole experience.

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Observation one: Why don’t you know?

When I worked as a communications advisor, if a client asked me: Hey, is this story on our award win worth a press release? I would hope to have known, even early in my career, that the answer is no. Most journalists will not care. However, I would have advised the client, while not a big story, you may want to consider putting a post on LinkedIn, slapping something on the website, or perhaps celebrating the win internally at the very least.

My point is, unless you’re pushing buttons in a factory, most jobs require having at least a minimum level of subject awareness and knowledge to best meet a customer’s needs. In the case of dealerships, I found the awareness of EV ownership amongst the majority to be near zero. Despite it being fundamentally the biggest change in the last 100 years of motoring, the idea of asking my simple ‘will it work for us question’ was often met with silence or sales reps looking nervously into their screens.

Apart from KIA, at every dealership I visited, no others had a pre-prepared formula to help put me at ease and provide reassurance. In most cases, the dealers I came across resorted to Googling in front of me. In many instances, dealers were aware of ‘Zapmap’, though I had to endure painful minutes waiting for them to redownload it from the app store.

In several instances, my concerns, which all dealers I asked agreed many EV buyers had about charging, were pushed aside. In most others, dealers were defaulting to talking about EV ownership in the context of home charging. An example was at VW, where I was told the staff had recently received a talk on calculating the cost per charge. However, when it came to looking at my situation, suddenly his promise of savings didn’t seem to add up, so he spent a lot of time looking down at his phone, clicking points on Zapmap.

I did think that the new Chinese EV makers would be great at this, especially BYD. However, even they were a bit basic. While the lady at BYD did seem to have a pre-prepared statement on charging using public devices, other than downloading Zapmap on her phone to show me, her bottom line was that I needed to go search online myself (picture of her showing me Zapmap on her desktop below).

From BYD

It wasn’t always Zapmap. In the case of Omoda, they just redirected me to Octopus. And that was it.

More positively, when visiting Stellantis, a representative I spoke to there showed me Octopus Electroverse, and he was even able to talk me through his own experience. It still didn’t feel totally smooth, though, albeit I did find his energy for EVs seemed very genuine and more reassuring.

For me, across all my experiences, KIA appeared to be the only one who’d thought about what their new EV journey looks like. On arrival and sharing my question, I was quickly taken to a ‘bright spark’ for the centre who was able to provide a full run through, and in particular gave me advice on how it could work even without off-street charging. He was also the first person to bring up the EV Database as a source of independent information.

Snapshot from KIA of them showing the EV Database

My recommendation… I would encourage all carmakers to ensure their dealerships have a process in place. Maybe all sales teams need several maps downloaded, and should spend time familiarising themselves with them. Otherwise, as I found, many reps will quickly return to their safe space promoting internal combustion, or even worse, ply people with the wrong information. EV chat shouldn’t be a foreign language for dealers, it should be their job.

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Observation two: Why so 90s?

One thing that I observed at nearly all the dealerships is, they haven’t changed with the times. It’s still mainly blokes, white shirts, blazers, and pretty little women on the reception desks. There’s some lively pop music playing in a largely empty warehouse, covered in steel and wipeable floors, with an occasional desk and wheelie chair.

Only at BYD did I speak to a female sales representative. Other than that, it was all a little ‘Tell Charles I’m on my way’ vibe still.

There is a whiff of estate agent in far too many of these centres, and I do wonder if that shapes the experience. Staff don’t look like they want to be there, and at the worst, some look like you’re disturbing them. As a customer, you can really feel it.

As you’ll see in the video, I remark how a few times it feels very awkward to go: I’m worried about charging? Especially as often you have to do so in earshot of their colleagues. And in many instances, where they make you feel like you’ve asked a really stupid question, you just feel like an idiot. This Not the Nine O’clock News sketch of a man trying to buy a record player is the closest depiction of how I felt in too many dealerships.

It wasn’t all of them, though. Tesla and BYD were both a bit more ‘hip’ and informal with their t-shirts. But, then again, those were the only two based in Westfield, so perhaps they were forced naturally to be more akin to shops. Rather than, in essence, an out-of-town office with some cars parked in it, as most dealerships are.

My recommendation… Lighten up. The best experiences I had were with energetic representatives (note… KIA, Hyundai, Stellantis). Yes, even when they didn’t have all the right or perfect answers, I still felt like I would go back to them. Despite all dealers now having a huge presence online, it’s still fundamentally a people business. And in the EV transition, that will pay back in spades.

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Observation three: Be more curious!

My final observation is that far too many dealerships and their teams are not proactive. I often felt it was a DIY situation. You enter, ask your question, get taken to a waiting area to get yourself a ‘self-serve coffee’, and then you're graced by someone who will talk at you, and not always listen.

At every single dealership I visited, I didn’t feel that anyone I spoke to really listened or tried to understand my worries. Instead, the default was to either talk about the wrong thing (e.g., how good home charging is and how costly it is to do it publicly) or provide a very general perspective, often resulting in me being sent to ‘go search online’.

It felt to me like there’s a huge gap for dealerships to be more curious about their consumers, especially as we enter this new world where not every EV buyer is going to look the same. We won’t all just have a driveway as standard. Some of us will be worried about batteries exploding, some about charging.

In some dealerships, they would begin by asking ‘how many miles do you do a week’, and that often felt quite silly. I have no idea how many I’d do a week. It changes. So I always answered going… ‘Well, the longest trips we’d do are to Wales or Somerset.’ Then they started to get more helpful. Though, why do I have to force this in?

Elsewhere, on a wider dealer point, at two visits (VW and Mercedes) I was forgotten about after speaking to a receptionist. Numerous staff would walk past me sitting on chairs, but never would there be any curiosity about whether I was ok? In the case of Mercedes, it really felt like they were happy to lose me.

My recommendation… Why doesn’t every centre have a maître’d? Or why isn’t there at least that ethos of ‘is everything ok? How can I make this better for you?’ Far too often, I felt like there was zero onus on the staff to delve into what I was feeling or looking for reassurance on. All the conversations broadly start from the position of ‘what are you driving now? Or… Are you looking for new or used?’ For me, that’s not helpful.

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Anyway… That’s all for today. I hope you have found this post useful. Please do drop me a note, email, or comment below. I always read and try to respond.

By Tom Riley | Add me on LinkedIn | Find my email here