Ford Motor Co.’s radical rethink of how it will sell electric vehicles has the auto retail industry on edge, and it was on the mind of Nissan dealers at the brand’s make meeting Friday.
Retailers asked management whether the automaker planned a Ford-style separation of its EV and combustion businesses.
And Nissan dealers wondered if their brand might adopt an agency-type model that would make retailers less involved in the sale and more like delivery and service providers. The answer they received was unequivocal.
“We’re going to continue to use our dealer body,” Nissan division U.S. sales chief Judy Wheeler told Automotive News after the meeting. “We’re not going to change our agreements. It’s business as usual.”
Scott Smith, chairman of the Nissan National Dealer Advisory Board, said the brand is committed to using the “dealer body as the instrument to sell EVs.”
Globally, Nissan Motor Co. is making a nearly $18 billion bet on electrification over the next five years and planning 15 battery-electric models by 2030. Nissan expects EVs to account for 40 percent of its U.S. sales by then.
Wheeler said Nissan’s franchised dealer network, with a decade of experience selling and servicing the Leaf hatchback, is a strategic weapon in the brand’s ambitions to reclaim relevancy in the burgeoning EV market.
“Everybody was offered to sell Ariya,” she said, referring to Nissan’s electric crossover arriving this year. “They just had to make the commitment on … the tools, the training.”
Chief Marketing Officer Allyson Witherspoon showed dealers Nissan’s marketing campaign for the NCAA basketball tournament starting next week. The advertising highlights Nissan’s lineage with battery-powered vehicles and dealers’ readiness for the technology.
But electrification will require major investment from automakers in technology, product development and production. Those costs could reduce dealer margins.
The below-the-line dealer margin on the Ariya is 8 to 9 percent, according to sources briefed on the matter.
“We have to make sure when we go to market [with the Ariya] that the dealers are able to retain a certain level of margin,” Wheeler said. “We’ve had preliminary discussions” with the dealers.