New: Q1 Voice of the Customer Report (Automotive) Go To Report
Explore the widening gap in customer experience between EV and gas buyers, revealing critical insights on communication and knowledge in dealership workflows.
Our latest research report analyzes 5.5M Google Reviews from 18,000 U.S. dealerships, revealing what customers are saying across the auto industry. Get your copy below:
Report: 2026 Voice of the Customer Report
Read online. Subscribe to REV
EV buyers in Q1 2026 are reporting a different service experience than gas or hybrid buyers. The clearest signal is communication, where 61% of negative reviews from EV buyers flag it as an issue, compared to about 52% for both gas and hybrid.
Gas and hybrid land within 0.2 points of each other. EV sits 9% above both.
The pattern isn't isolated to communication. We observe more frustration among EV customers in the service department, generally, more specifically with repair quality and wait times.
A year ago, we wrote about the source of friction in the EV dealership experience: staff knowledge. EV buyers in Q1 2025 were 34% more likely than gas buyers to flag knowledge as a problem. The working assumption was that as OEMs invested in EV-specific training and dealers got more reps with the product, that gap would close.
Q1 2026 data tells a different story.
Knowledge complaints widened, not narrowed.
EV negative knowledge mentions grew from 4.7% in Q1 2025 to 6.4% in Q1 2026. Gas held essentially flat. The relative gap between EV and Gas widened from +34% to +86%.
Communication flipped from a non-issue to a major one.
In Q1 2025, EV buyers complained about communication slightly less than Gas buyers. This year, they're complaining 17.7% more.
Both topics moved in the wrong direction at the same time. That complicates the easy read. If the issue were just that dealers need more EV training, knowledge complaints should be trending down.
The data doesn't tell us why the gap is widening. What it does suggest: this isn't a "give the team a refresher" problem.
Katelyn Gilmore, GM at Paradise Chevrolet, has made the point that EV service can't run on the same playbook as ICE. Different vehicle, different conversation, different workflow. As she's put it, when a customer gets routed through five people with five different answers, the issue isn't what any one of them knows. It's that the process around them was built for a different product.
One read of the data: knowledge and communication complaints aren't two separate problems. They're symptoms of EV customers moving through a dealership workflow built for a different product.
If that's right, the friction won't close with more training. It'll close when the workflow underneath it changes. The Q1 data doesn't show that happening yet.
Year-over-year change in EV vs. gas negative mention rates. Both knowledge and communication moved against EV between Q1 2025 and Q1 2026.
When review volume is low, every comment carries too much weight. After scaling up, Cavender Auto Group started spotting real patterns and learned to mine 2- to 4-star feedback for the honest signal.
"It's from these reviews that you're going to be able to collect the most information about which systems work and which don't." — Colby Joyner, VP Marketing & Strategy.
See you next week - Emily, Marketing @Widewail
U3GM Blog Post Comments