There isn’t a Tesla store in downtown Portland, Oregon, although next year the city will get something that at a quick glance might be mistaken for one. It’s to be called the Oregon Living Lab, a storefront gallery that will act as a brand-neutral showcase for electric-vehicle technology, exhibits, and events and a hub for demos and test drives.
The Living Lab is part of a plan proposed by Drive Oregon, a Pacific Northwest electric-vehicle advocacy and industry group. It’s slated to be almost entirely federally funded—by a $993,450 award, part of a $58 million allocation designated to advance “fuel-efficient vehicle technologies” from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Vehicle Technologies program. In all, the program is funding 35 projects that aim to reduce the cost and improve the efficiency of plug-in electric vehicles as well as conventional gasoline and alternative-fuel vehicles.
The showroom is needed for one reason: Beyond a narrow group of geeky early adopters—who arrive at the showroom often better informed than the dealership’s sales staff—electric cars are a tough sell. Simply put, a lot of car shoppers for whom EVs would work fine as daily drivers don’t understand the benefits of driving electric. Convincing those shoppers of the vehicles’ merits involves more time and effort on the part of salespeople and dealerships than some stores are willing to contribute.
That led the National Automotive Dealers Association to put out some guidelines on how to market and sell electric vehicles, cautioning that “for any number of reasons, including the relative affordability, convenience, and performance of [internal combustion] vehicles, a significant market-based demand for plug-in electric vehicles has yet to materialize.”
Over three years, the Drive Oregon project aims for real, quantifiable results. These include getting 50 more partners signed on to a Department of Energy charging challenge, recruiting 12 more public or private fleets for a West Coast electric-fleet pledge, and to put butts in seats with 5000 electric-vehicle test drives.
Drive Oregon’s physical showcase will be around the block from Portland’s Electric Avenue, which serves as a test bed for fast-charging solutions. The showroom will have free overnight parking for EVs that are directly related to showcase activities.
Take Delivery on Electric Avenue
The project won’t be selling cars, but it will offer a seamless “fulfillment process” via partnerships with local dealerships—at the start, the local Tonkin dealership group, which numbers more than 20 stores. Pricing might be negotiated remotely from the showroom, while the dealership could potentially bring paperwork to the facility and offer delivery to the customer then and there.
Ultimately, the three-year Oregon project will be gauged a success based on how much it has affected sales numbers, said the group’s director, Jeff Allen. “General outreach campaigns tend to be too squishy,” he admitted. “On one end, you have automakers who are in the business of selling their cars; on the other, you have government or agency outreach who are often buried in minutiae. We are absolutely in the business of selling people on the product.”
Drive Oregon is aiming for pure-electric vehicles to be 15 percent of new-car sales in the Pacific Northwest by 2025. It has a long way to go. Currently, even in green Oregon, combined sales of EVs and plug-in hybrids add up to less than two percent of the sales mix. On a per-capita registration basis for 2015, Oregon, Washington, and Georgia top two percent, while California stands at less than five percent.
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