On 04/14/2013 04:22 PM, brucedp5 wrote:
People should understand that not all dealerships are the same. That while they greet to sell you that they are a great resource, that is not always the case. Before you buy your plugin you have to do your homework.
I recently had, fortunately, the opposite experience you did. I was interested in looking at the new Ford C-Max plug-in hybrid. The closest dealer to me didn't have any and wasn't yet "electric certified" by Ford. But a dealer 15 miles away did have one. I made an appointment for the following week. The salesman knew the car and started out wanting to have a frank talk about plugin-hybrids. Not to discourage me from buying one but to make sure I had realistic expectations. 20 miles EV range and my daily commute is 16 miles so it's going to work for me.
The cars were so new that they didn't have any brochures. He had one--a "training" brochure--that he went over with us but wouldn't let us take.
He also had bad news/good news. The C-Max they had when I originally called had sold BUT they had two more that had just come in. We just had to wait 30 minutes for them to be prepped and charged.
We walked over to their outdoor charging station where they had parked the two cars. They were right next to two Focus EVs. One of the 2 C-Maxes was the exact car I would have ordered. Right color and right options. We went for a test drive in that car. Again it was obvious he knew (mostly) what he was talking about when talking about the features of a plug-in car.
Back at the dealership I decided to buy it. Oddly it wasn't listed in their inventory and he had to do some investigation into why. It turns out someone had ordered it from the factory. But were impatient and when the dealer got the one in that I was originally told about, he came in and bought that one. So some anonymous person ordered my car for me, just like I wanted.
While we were working out the details, the salesman had to go wrest the keys away from another salesman who, it seems, was about to sell my car to someone else.
So my impression was that a) this particular dealer knows EVs and plug-ins and b) they are actually selling them as fast as they get them. But just so you don't get the wrong idea about them--they also had one of those race prepped Mustangs in the showroom.
BTW, even though I would love to be driving a real EV right now, it was going to be hard for our lifestyle. I do love driving this thing in EV mode. I have 585 miles on it, 410 of which are electric, and still have half a tank of gas. We bought it on Good Friday and almost immediately made a 150 mile round trip on Easter Sunday. Since then it's been almost exclusively electric.
--Rick _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
