While the Tesla Motors CEO, Elon Musk, works towards his lawful campaign to get more states to permit direct automaker-to-shopper deals, he may have found support. It comes as a new Sierra Club overview that rates the quality of service from dealerships that offer electric vehicles. So, a planned EV prospective owner’s odds of having a positive experience with the dealers at Tesla stores in California are solid. With regards to the other automakers’ dealers in the rest of the world? Apparently, things are not all that great.

The Sierra Club brought out people this past spring to over 308 dealerships across California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, and Vermont. Basically, Tesla gave by a large margin the best rated customer experiences out of their fellow automakers, leaving BMW, Chevrolet, and Nissan in the dust. Fiat and Ford were rated squarely in the middle as their “positive” rankings drifted around the 50-percent level. Meanwhile, VW, Porsche, Hyundai, and Volvo merchants were stuck in the back of the pack. Out of the 308 dealerships that test customers went to, the Sierra Club gave a five-star (best) service rating to around 90 of them, and 38 of them were from California.

A portion of the specific results was nothing less than staggering. At about one in seven dealerships, the electric vehicles on location were not adequately charged for the purpose of a test drive. There was likewise a one-in-three possibility that the merchant didn’t raise either government or state rebates and incentives (discounts), which numerous EV  purchasers could fit the bill for. More than half of the merchants didn’t give guidelines on the most efficient way to appropriately energize an EV. For dealerships that really had genuine, physical EVs on site, California merchants had around six, while the typical stock in different states was three.

En pocas palabras, el Sierra Club recomendó que los concesionarios se pusieran al día con su aprendizaje sobre vehículos eléctricos, mantuvieran más vehículos eléctricos en stock y tuvieran una mejor presentación en lo que respecta a demostrar a los compradores potenciales tanto los métodos generalmente aceptados para hacer funcionar los vehículos eléctricos como la forma de obtener más descuentos en ellos. Al final del día, deben intentar vender vehículos eléctricos en serio.

Sierra Club’s test customers heading into dealerships, wanting to discover electric vehicles or module hybrids, instead found a tangle of reasons they couldn’t. Numerous customers found the EVs hard to find at the dealership. Volunteer customers found, at about 42 percent of visits, that EVs were either “not prominently displayed” or were just “somewhat prominently displayed.” At about 14 percent of dealerships, customers were informed that the EV they asked to test drive wasn’t adequately charged; Chevy and Ford dealerships were particularly predisposed to this issue, at 22 and 21 percent, individually. What’s more, a bunch of offers staff did not know about EV working costs, refunds, and expense credits.

"Si bien algunos de los participantes de nuestra encuesta Rev Up EVs descubrieron que los concesionarios están empleando prácticas impresionantes para vender una gran cantidad de vehículos eléctricos, muchos encontraron obstáculo tras obstáculo en su búsqueda de inventario de vehículos eléctricos, pruebas de manejo y vendedores expertos", dijo la directora de la Iniciativa de Vehículos Eléctricos del Sierra Club, Gina Coplon-Newfield, coautora del informe (AutoBlog).

For the purposes of this survey, “mystery” customers were requested to rate their encounters with respect to various subtle elements on a scale from 1 (negative) to 5 (positive). Each brand was then given composite evaluations, with blends of positive, unremarkable, or negative encounters generally speaking, representing that wide scope of reactions. Among them, the experiences with Tesla, BMW, Chevrolet, and Nissan stores were found to be the best. All aside from Tesla and Audi were evaluated to be fair or mediocre, and customers discovered Porsche and Mercedes-Benz retailers to be particularly negative experiences. It’s not in any manner astonishing that Tesla, with 100 percent of its vehicles being electric, was given a solid rating for unmistakably showing its electric vehicles and for being educated about appropriate tax credits and discounts.