Press

Electric-vehicle advocates and early adopters have long maintained the experience of learning about EVs, shopping for them, and buying them is better at those few brands that sell directly to buyers—Tesla foremost, now also Lucid and Rivian—than at conventional third-party franchised dealers of the sort used by Toyota, GM, Honda, Ford, and other established carmakers. 

Now a study from the research firm Pied Piper appears to turn that conventional wisdom on its head. Conducted from July 2021 to June 2022, it compared the helpfulness and responsiveness of sales staff from established brands against those at independent locations operated by EV startups. Covering 25 premium brands, it spanned more than 1000 measurements of the in-person sales experience and 1650 measurements of responsiveness to customer inquiries on the company's website. The five top-ranked brands were Cadillac, Infiniti, Mercedes-Benz, Acura, and Volvo, while four of the five lowest scorers were EV companies: Tesla, Lucid, Polestar, and Rivian.