Pub. 5 Issue 4

39 such as transmissions. (The largest potential cost, which is re- placing the battery, doesn’t factor in until relatively late in an EV’s life; the warranty on the Bolt’s battery covers eight years or 100,000 miles.) One of the problems with the business model,” Drake told me, “is that if you take away the service, the cost of the car is going to have to go up just because the warranty charges subsidize the front end. Guys are going to have to make more selling an EV because they’re going to make less fixing it.” Drake, who describes himself as “way more progressive than most dealers on EVs” and autonomous vehicles, expects the physical footprint of auto dealerships to shrink as they cut back their service departments. That could be a source of revenue for those that own their locations. “A lot of this really expensive real estate will be repurposed somehow.” Dealers such as Drake and Holter — a member of a dealer ad- visory council on EVs for General Motors — believe that one thing holding back EV sales is a lack of inventory. “Every month we’ve sold every Bolt we have and asked for more,” Holter says. Many prospective Bolt buyers are well-versed in the car’s fea- tures by the time they walk in the door. Still, they typically represent the core market for EVs — they’re relatively affluent and educated and have access to charging because they live in single-family housing. Expanding the market means reaching out to a new customer base for EVs. Addressing those challenges is Holter’s goal in bringing his staff together for the weekly seminars. “The idea is to make them confident to answer questions people have,” Holter says. “The more they can do that, the more we can break into the large market of people who haven’t bought EVs.” A knowledgeable sales force is key because EV buying and own- ership involve complexities that don’t exist with conventional cars. EV owners need to think about time-of-use rates from the electrical utilities, allowing them to charge their vehicles during lower-priced off-peak hours. There’s a dizzying variety of rebates. The standard California state subsidy is $2,000 on a Bolt, but $4,500 for families with income less than 300% of the federal poverty line, or $78,600 for a family of four. The federal tax credit of up to $7,500 has phased out for GM cars such as the Bolt because the company sold more than 200,000 EVs, but other subsidies and rebates are available from General Motors, utilities and retailers such as Costco; Dwayne Chew, one of Holter’s sales staff, says that he has managed to cobble together breaks worth as much as $12,000 for customers. Then there’s driving technique, a consideration irrelevant to owners of gasoline-powered cars. The Bolt has a regenerative braking feature, which reduces wear and tear on the friction brakes while generating electricity to charge the battery. The feature works best in stop-and-go traffic. Chew, who drives a Bolt to Felix from his home in Carson, says that he can reduce the need to recharge his car to as seldom as once a week by taking surface streets. “I tell my customers, ‘You need to drive the car a lot smarter.’” Sell smarter too. Even within big automakers such as General Motors, executives are becoming convinced that a wave of EV ownership is coming. The industry is standing on the edge of the water. Dealers are coming around to the idea that the time has come to get their feet wet.   AUTO DEALERS — continued from page 38 The federal tax credit of up to $7,500 has phased out for GM cars such as the Bolt because the company sold more than 200,000 EVs, but other subsidies and rebates are available from General Motors, utilities and retailers such as Costco; Dwayne Chew, one of Holter’s sales staff, says that he has managed to cobble together breaks worth as much as $12,000 for customers.