By Ben Thorpe | Posted in Manufacturer News, Best Practices
An article last month from the Wall Street Journal covered how electric vehicle startup Fisker would be transitioning from a direct-to-consumer distribution model to signing up 50 dealers this year. Handling the selling process itselfs ended up being “too expensive,” according to the report and less than half of the 10,000 SUVs Fisker made last year actually ended up with customers.
“The automaker’s decision is a major strategic about-face for a startup that once believed dealerships would be a hurdle to its success,” the report says.
Another hurdle Fisker encountered should come as no surprise: without the ability to let customers sit in and drive its vehicles before pulling the trigger, the company had a harder time selling them. In fact, for the entire U.S., Fisker only had 2 physical stores (in Los Angeles and New York City) where customers could actually sit in their cars.
It’s impossible to deny that consumer purchasing tastes are trending more than ever toward the internet. In another blog last month, I covered how Hyundai will be selling its cars on Amazon. The current plan has those Hyundai cars being picked up at dealerships (though Amazon is “working on delivering the vehicles”), and I doubt they will sell many through Amazon unless consumers can visit their local dealerships to actually sit in these cars first.
But the most interesting part of the Fisker article to me was this portion at the end, a quote from Fisker’s CEO Henrik Fisker: “This is where we think we have to go as a company, if we want to be a high-volume company.”