Hieu Le, Campaign Representative at Sierra Club, gave this presentation at Forth's webinar on September 10, 2019

1. Hieu Le
Campaign Representative, Sierra Club
Email: hieu.le@sierraclub.org

2. Introduction
In 2016, the Sierra Club conducted a volunteer led study of how Electric Vehicles (EVs)
were being sold in California and 9 other states that had adopted California’s Zero
Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) mandate.
Over 174 volunteers signed up to visit or make phone calls to auto dealerships and stores
(Tesla), to interact with salespeople and report back to us via an online survey on how their
experience went.
Since then, we recently launched our 2019 campaign which surveyed over 680 dealerships
in all 50 states to better understand how EVs were being sold in the country.

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4. Key Findings
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5. Key Findings
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6. Key Findings
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7. Electric Vehicle Inventory
Our volunteers either often found no EVs on the lot or a very
limited amount (average of 4.5 models for those that had EVs).
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8. Electric Vehicle Visibility
Volunteers indicated to us that EVs were not prominently
displayed on the lots
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9. Salespeople Knowledge of EVs
Our volunteers interacted with many salespeople who
had limited knowledge of vital information [charging,
battery range, savings costs, and federal and state
incentives] that could convince consumers to buy an
EV.
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10. Top Performing Auto dealers
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11. Best Practices & Recommendations
Based on our findings, we recommended best practices and improvements that would improve the
EV consumer shopping experience, and would lead to more sales and adoption of electric
vehicles.
• Inventory
• Automakers need to accelerate manufacturing and offerings, and distribute larger
number of EVs to dealerships across states
• Dealerships need to increase number of EVs they can secure from automakers
• Remove barriers for dealers [certification fees]
• Visibility
• Display EVs prominently
• Expertise
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