A Third Of This Dealer's Sales Are Chevy Volt Electric Cars: How'd They Do It?
Can any other franchised dealer in the world make the claim that full one-third of its sales are a single model of plug-in electric car?
Bourgeois Chevrolet of Rawdon, Quebec, achieved that remarkable level in its sales this year of the Chevrolet Volt range-extended electric car.
<snip>
Last year, having invested the time to train its entire staff to sell the Volt, the dealership saw the plug-in grow to represent fully 14 percent of its sales.
The range-extended electric Volt and the battery-electric Chevy Spark EV are the only cars shown on the main page of the dealer's website, in fact.
And its salespeople reached that number despite co-owner Samuel Jeanson's continuing struggle to secure inventory--along with his off-the-cuff estimate that it took salespeople about five times longer to sell a Volt than a regular vehicle.
(This can be viewed as a positive development, actually. It means that Quebec's Volt buyers are no longer highly-informed "early adopters," but are now part of the much, much larger "early majority" market of consumers.)
Unable to secure enough new Volts from GM, this year Bourgeois Chevrolet began importing used ones from the United States.
Lots of them.
Enough, in fact, to keep about 50 Volts of various colors and configurations on the lot at any given time--which is how the Chevy Volt has come to represent a full 35 percent of the dealership's year-to-date sales.
Because that 35-percent figure includes cheaper used vehicles, it might not be reachable if looking solely at new-car sales. But we may never be able to test that thesis, given the difficulty the dealership has had getting and keeping new Volts in stock.
<snip>
