Ford Agrees To Give Dealers Money Back After Making Them Install EV Chargers

It’s the National Auto Dealers Association show this week and luckily it’s being held in the one place that’ll never have to deal with massive amounts of snow in January: New Orleans. Taps earpiece. I’ve been informed that New Orleans is now a giant, boozy snow globe.

The Morning Dump is going to start in the Big Easy, where some dealers are gathered. You don’t need a reason to party in New Orleans, but if you’re a Ford dealer there are up to 240,000 reasons to celebrate as that’s the much Ford might reimburse you if you installed EV chargers in the company’s push to be an electric brand.

While the company might be slowing its EV ambitions, it’s still one of the biggest sellers of electric cars in this country, even if the United States isn’t expanding in the EV market at quite the rate that many automakers had hoped. Where else might EVs work? India, here we come.

Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Ford Reimbursing Dealers Up To $240,000 For Aborted EV Expansion Plans

The early 2020s were a wild time. COVID was all the rage. Taylor Swift fans were mad at Jake Gyllenhaal. Many of the biggest car companies, looking at Tesla’s growth, assumed they’d be selling millions of EVs as soon as they put them on the market.

In order to prepare for this, Ford created its Model e dealership certification program. There were two levels: Model e Certified Elite and Model e Certified, with the Elite plan requiring a huge investment in public chargers and service and the non-Elite plan requiring a smaller investment. If dealers didn’t agree to this plan they’d be unable to get new electric cars and trucks to sell.

Here’s a Detroit Free Press article outlining how many dealers had voluntarily enrolled in the initial version of the program as of December 2022 — about 1,920 of Ford’s approximately 3,000 dealers. As soon as it became clear that not everyone was going to be able to find Tesla-like performance, especially amid a price war, dealers joined much of the rest of the industry in trying to figure out what to do next.

By December 2023 the number of interested dealers dropped to about half, and many other dealers and dealer groups sued Ford stating that it was an unreasonable and discriminatory form of distribution that violated their franchise agreement.

Ford eventually relented and canceled the program. Here’s what the company said at the time of canceling, via CNBC:

“The world has changed,” Marin Gjaja, chief operating officer of Ford’s Model E electric vehicle business, said Thursday during a media briefing. “The growth has slowed down.”

Gjaja said the Model e Dealership Program, which included about half of Ford’s 2,800 U.S. dealers, “is being sunset” as the market undergoes changing conditions and amid conversations with dealers. The company had faced lawsuits from dealers over the program.

Instead, Ford will open EV sales to all of its dealers in an attempt to grow sales of its all-electric cars and trucks.

What about the dealers who started the program? According to Automotive News, they’re going to get a nice little reimbursement:

One option, according to a bulletin sent to retailers and obtained by Automotive News, would give dealers $10,000 per Level 3 charger installed plus $2,000 per EV retailed through 2026, up to a maximum of $80,000 for each charger. For dealers who asked for more time to sell EVs, Ford added the option of taking $1,750 per vehicle retailed through 2027, with the same $80,000 maximum per charger.

Both options would pay out up to $240,000 because Ford had required dealers to install as many as three Level 3 chargers.

A third option would give dealers immediate payments of $40,000 per Level 3 charger installed, up to $120,000. This option would not include any money back for each EV sold but might be better for smaller, rural dealerships that don’t anticipate selling many EVs in the next few years and want the money faster.

That’s not bad. Also, my guess is that many of the dealers who really ramped up probably serve a market (like, say, Southern California’s Galpin Ford) that has a lot of EV customers and can use this money, potentially, to improve charging capabilities and training. Will this encourage David to buy more i3s or busted Leafs?

NADA Update: ‘The Good News Is The Party Is Still Going On, And There Will Be Plenty Of Booze’

The nation’s auto dealers were supposed to all descend on New Orleans this week for the big annual conference, in what I’m sure was to be the kind of teetotaling and restrained businesslike atmosphere that the city is known for. Instead, a freak historic snowstorm shut down the airport, and now dealers who didn’t get in early or can’t drive are stuck at home.

This is a bummer, as Automotive News reports:

A pre-NADA Show private party hosted by five industry vendors was impacted by the weather. The caterer for the Jan. 22 event canceled, leaving hosts to figure out how to feed guests.

”We’re looking at pizza places, restaurants to order from,” said Laurie Halter of Charisma! Communications, one of the hosts. “The good news is the party is still going on, and there will be plenty of booze.”

Two beignets and four hurricanes is roughly the average diet of a New Orleans tourist, so I’m glad the people who are there are at least having some fun.

These Five Cars Made Up More Than Half Of EV Sales Last December

Now that we’ve got a full read on December sales and, perhaps more importantly, a sense of the new White House’s plans for electric cars, we can dive deeper into the data.

According to Cox Automotive’s latest numbers, just five cars made up about 54% of all EV sales in December:

1. Tesla Model Y
2. Tesla Model 3
3. Honda Prologue
4. Ford Mustang Mach-E
5. Chevrolet Equinox EV

Obviously, most of those sales are of the two Teslas, but so far the Prologue has been a big seller and I’ve been impressed with how it’s already outflanked its GM platform-mates. There’s been so much demand lately for EVs that supply has stabilized a bit and prices are even going up. From Cox:

In December, the average transaction price for new electric vehicles was $55,544, marking a 1.1% increase from the previous month and a 0.8% rise from the previous year. EV incentives were equal to 14.3% of the ATP last month, which was lower than in November when EV incentives were equal to 14.7%. In December, the ATP for a new EV was $6,274 higher than the ICE+ ATP ($49,270), the second-lowest premium in 2024. The top five most affordable EVs in December were the Nissan Leaf, Fiat 500e, Hyundai Kona, Kia Niro and Chevrolet Equinox.

If Congress moves to remove the tax credit I suspect we’ll see a big rush of sales at the last minute.

Is India The Next Big EV Market?

It’s not just NADA this week, it’s also the Bharat Mobility Global Expo 2025 in India. This is the third biggest market after China and the United States, so automakers that are having trouble moving electric cars in other places are eyeing a future there.

Electric cars are all the rage at the Bharat Expo, which is India’s biggest car show.

From Bloomberg:

India is starting from a low point. While electric car sales have surged — a 55-fold jump in six years — even an 18% year-on-year increase in the 12 months to December 2024 only took the world’s most populous nation to 113,715 vehicles, according to BloombergNEF. Falling battery costs and new models mean that number is likely to overtake traditional cars, but only by 2039.

Viewed one way, that’s not great, but viewed another way it just means there’s a lot of room for growth. At the show were representatives of European, Indian, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, and Chinese brands. Many of these companies were showing electric cars, albeit of the lower-cost variety.

What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD

In honor of all those who made it to New Orleans, here’s The Simpsons doing a musical version of A Streetcar Named Desire. “Oh, Streetcar!”

The Big Question

If you bought an EV, which did you buy? If you were forced to buy an EV, what would you get?