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%.
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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.
