Question, since Tesla no longer sell's "CPO's" shouldn't the name of EV-CPO.com be revised? Might eliminate any confusion. Just a suggestion.
Good question. While it's true that Tesla doesn't sell "CPO" cars anymore, most people when looking for used car listings for Teslas, do google searches for 'tesla cpo' or similar search terms with "cpo" in it. It's just how people think car companies sell their own used cars, even though Tesla doesn't use that term anymore.
So here is a list of the top search terms people use to find my website (in alphabetical order, not highest search term first):
- certified preowned tesla
- cp evo
- cpo ev
- cpo tesla
- cpo tesla for sale
- CPO Tesla Model S
- electric vehicle tesla for sale search ev
- ev cpo
- EV CPO
- evcpo
- ev-cpo
- ev-cpo hunter
- ev-cpo tesla
- ev-cpo.com
- tesla cpo
- tesla cpo inventory
So if I changed the domain name, that would severely impact how people find and use the website through search engines, and I think a lot of people would find that more confusing than the fact that Tesla doesn't use the term "CPO" cars anymore. There's an entire industry on Search Engine Optimization ("SEO") and it would be a really bad move for me to change the domain name and loose such great rankings for these search terms that took years to build. For a long time (and even sometimes now), if you google "Tesla CPO" or "CPO Tesla" -- EV-CPO will be listed first, and Tesla's own website second.
Also, if you look on any of the major discussion websites (TMC, reddit, facebook, etc) whenever someone new asks about finding used Teslas for sale, everyone posts a reply: EV-CPO.com. It's short, memorable, and has been in use for over four years now. It would be really detrimental to give up that collective community knowledge and support. It would be like if Coke tried to change their name because there's no longer any cocaine in the product (it's true, there was!). Or for another example, the company "3M" used to stand for "Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing" but they are certainly do much more and different things from that, but they kept the "3M" for similar reasons.
Had I known that Tesla was going to drop the "CPO" in the future, I would have used something different. Also, when Tesla first started their CPO program, it was just CPO/used cars, no new/inventory cars were listed, nor did anyone predict they were going to start listing new cars for sale right next to the CPO cars. I also wanted to stay away from any domain name that had "Tesla" in it, so to avoid any potential trademark or cease-and-desist lawsuits down the road. So at the time, EV-CPO was the most appropriate thing to name the website. Despite the relatively minor confusion over the "CPO" part, I think people like it.
So as much as I'd like to find a better, more appropriate domain name, I think I'm sticking with EV-CPO.com for the foreseeable future.