Pub 11 2021 Issue 2

12 AUTOMOBILE DEALER NEWS ILLINOIS www.illinoisdealers.com The Big Lie By Mike Stanton, president and CEO of the National Automobile Dealers Association A s someone who has dedicated his career to advocat- ing on behalf of America’s franchised auto dealers, I’ve embraced the reality that one of my chief roles is to serve as Myth Buster In Chief. For years, one of the great myths that have persisted about the auto industry has been that franchised dealers don’t want to sell electric vehicles. It’s long past time to put this myth out to pasture. And it’s time to call it out for what it is: A lie about franchised dealers, propagated by the handful of companies that want to destroy the franchise system. Before we get into why this myth persists and why it’s morphed into such a blatant lie, let’s acknowledge something right at the outset. More than a decade ago, there was indeed some dealer uneasiness about battery-electric vehicles. The EVs of the early and mid-2000s were — let’s face it — by and large compliance cars. They had inadequate range, took forever and were a pain to recharge, did not perform well, had terrible resale value and were extremely expensive. But it wasn’t that dealers didn’t want to sell them to willing customers. Dealers didn’t want to be force-fed vehicles that OEMs were manufacturing largely in response to regulatory pressures as opposed to actual market demand. Given the imbalance in the OEM-dealer relationship, which gives dealers little capacity to avoid any such OEM force-feeding, you can hardly blame dealers for this early trepidation. But that was a long, long time ago. The world has changed considerably, these vehicles have changed considerably, and they are hardly compliance cars any longer. The level of invest- ment and commitment that traditional automakers have made in battery-electric technology is night-and-day different from what it was even five years ago, and it shows in the product. Several other things have also changed. Across the country, more charging stations with faster-charging capability are popping up almost every day, and the federal government may appropriate billions of dollars to grow the nation’s recharging infrastructure significantly. On top of this, we are rapidly ap- proaching price parity. Owning an EV for the long haul is