
Rollout of Chevy Bolt May Mark Turning Point for Electric Car Market - happy-go-lucky
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/02/13/514513439/rollout-of-chevy-bolt-may-mark-turning-point-for-electric-car-market
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mtgx
> "The marketing has been terrible, disastrous. It's such a lost opportunity.
> For one thing, automotive dealers have done a terrible job in the United
> States of explaining what electric cars are, they don't have them on the
> lot, so that's hardly their fault,"

Oh, no. It's definitely their fault, and the fault of the dealers as well.
Neither really _want_ EVs to succeed, for the same reason Blackberry and Nokia
didn't really want touchscreen phones to succeed, even after they had started
selling their own models as well. It's just much easier and _preferable_ to
maintain the status quo.

A radical change such as converting from ICE-powered cars to EVs means an
almost complete replacement or retraining of their employees, for starters. It
also means that previously market leaders have to "catch-up" in technology and
performance with early entrants in the market, such as Tesla, that have more
EV expertise than them.

It means that they can't compete on "engine performance" anymore (not really),
something that has set the car makers apart for 100 years. They will have to
compete mainly on things like battery size (which is highly dependent on
supplier prices, but also their EV platforms, which as mentioned, is something
new to them) and "smart" stuff, like autonomous driving, which is heavily
software-dependent, and the traditional car makers don't have that much
experience with that either.

