So, you bowed to the pressure to buy an electric vehicle and you are ready for the big savings to pile up. But just when you thought you were in the money, you found a whole new problem keeping your car off the road and causing expenses to soar.
Electric vehicles are supposed to allow owners to grin giddily as they pass one gas station after another, saving the driver hundreds with every pump they pass. But there are an awful lot of issues on the downside that EV dealers are not exactly thrilled to tell potential buyers.
For instance. What happens when your EV breaks down and you need service?
Apparently, in many cases, not much is the answer to that.
The industry is warning new EV owners that they may have a little problem finding qualified service technicians when their EVs have issues, Fox News Business Network reported.
Dealerships, especially, are warning that even they are having trouble finding enough qualified techs to service the cars.
“The government’s wanting to make this transition and shift to EVs, and there are several concerns around that in the automotive vertical and specifically the dealership world,” Sean Kelley, founder of CarMotivators, told FNBN.
Kelly added that service shops are facing a serious shortage of mechanics who have been trained to work on electric cars.
That isn’t the only problem service shops are having. The sets of specialized tools that the shops need to purchase are extremely expensive and are not in great supply.
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Then there are the new charging stations needed to recharge the cars they are servicing. These stations often mean repair shops to begin “tearing apart your whole shop” to rearrange their floor plan to accommodate them, Kelly said.
Small, independent dealerships have it worse, Kelly added, because they don’t have a cost-effective pipeline to the original equipment manufacturer tools and information and find it harder to deal with EV repairs.
This makes the costs of gearing up to include EV repairs extremely difficult for all car dealers, including the big dogs.
On the other hand, EVs do have less maintenance, so EV owners might expect fewer reasons to find their autos sitting in a repair bay.
One Tesla owner told FNBN that they don’t have problems getting technicians sent out when they are needed. And General Motors added that they are graduating more new techs every year and sending them out to serve their customers. Ford and Hyundai made similar claims.
One thing the manufacturers and dealers studiously avoided is the question of battery pack expenses. As The Western Journal reported before, replacing battery packs is an expensive proposition.
As the prices of lithium and other minerals needed to manufacture EVs soar because of higher demand, the costs of battery packs for EVs are seeing pressure. As it is, the battery pack is one of the most expensive parts of an electric vehicle.
Anyone buying a used EV might expect to have to sink around $13,000, more into their purchase when their used battery pack expires — and that would be a back door cost on top of the purchase price of the used car that might make procuring a used EV cost-prohibitive.
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