The Expert Podcast

So, where do you get the best information on the electric vehicle market and what's happening with EV sales? Well, get it right from the horse's mouth. There's a lot of pundits in financial publications, news publications, or even economic, social, and political publications that guess about what's happening with EVs. But right at the source of it is the actual auto industry. Here's a great publication that gets into the actual sales, buyers, and sellers of EV markets, and this comes from Auto Remarketing. They quote Experian, which is one of the very pulses of electric vehicle purchases.

What they're seeing is that the market is really continuing to grow from a volume perspective. The number of new retail transactions is increasing dramatically. There's increased activity in buyer profiles, meaning that a lot of early adopters are increasing technology, but it's also seeing organic growth because some people are switching from gasoline to electric, even though they've never had an electric vehicle before.

Now, what about used EVs? According to pre-owned EV sales, the volume is not there yet compared to new. Part of it's because there hasn't been a lot of used EVs in the marketplace over the last couple of years. When you're looking at a new vehicle with the discounts and incentives, a lot of the price difference that you see on gasoline vehicles isn't there. Additionally, a lot of the used EVs that were in the marketplace were priced at a higher level through the auction or acquisition. Now that Tesla and other manufacturers are discounting new vehicles, some of the used cars are now being dumped at lower prices, so that the retail offering on the car lots is also going down.

How many are we talking about? Well, there were 60,000 pre-owned vehicles financed in 2021. That's a pretty decent number, but it's not huge. In 2022, it'll probably settle in at about maybe 80,000 to 85,000. I believe in 2023, it will be the first year that there will be over a hundred thousand used electric vehicles financed, and that's going to set the stage for bigger and bigger numbers as more of these two or three-year-old electric vehicles come off trade-in and are sold at auctions.

The most important thing for dealers is to follow the data. It's not just typical old-school retailing or auto marketing. You really have to dive into the numbers and find out who your target market is, where they are shopping, what their demographics are, and match your advertising and offerings to those parties. You even have to manage your vehicle acquisition and inventory to match what your market is looking for.