Car Dealers Are Terrified of Tesla’s Plan to Eliminate Oil Changes

[jmowreader]

55. It's the delusion that auto dealers have something against electric cars

The thing auto dealers have something against is not having cars to sell. Let's be real: how many people are in the market for $70,000 cars? There are eleven Mercedes-Benz models, eleven Lexuses, a couple of Jaguars, ten Cadillacs, most of the BMW line, the Porsche Cayenne, every Lincoln they make, and the whole freakin' Volvo line that cost less than the cheapest Tesla...and that's just the establishment cars. Even at $35,000 there are a lot of less-expensive cars.

If he wants to be competitive in the auto industry he needs two things: a car that costs $25,000 and an optional gasoline generator. Thirty-five bills puts him the low end of almost all the brands in the last paragraph (Porsche Cayennes are too expensive), and no one ever asked a Volvo salesman if he was gonna get stuck forty miles from nowhere with no access to fuel. That doesn't happen. Even in Pig's Knuckle, Arkansas, you can get gas for a Volvo. I can think right off the top of my head of twenty places within an hour's drive of me where there will NEVER be a place to charge an electric car if you're just passing through. The people who live in Kansas and Nebraska can do the same thing. $25,000 puts him in the Nissan Leaf's neighborhood, and Nissan sells all of those they can make. And the generator gives the buyer an option: do I totally divorce the oil companies with a purely electric car, or do I make sure I can get home tonight with a backup generator?