We keep hearing that automakers are hemorrhaging money trying to sell electric vehicles. Subaru spends three times more marketing EVs than gas cars. Luxury brands are dumping nine-figure budgets into campaigns. The narrative writes itself: EVs are hard to sell, so companies are throwing cash at the problem.
But this misses something crucial. The marketing spend isn't the structural problem. It's a symptom of one.
The real issue is that traditional dealer networks were built for a different product. A century of automotive retail evolved around service intervals, engine complexity, trade-in valuations based on mechanical wear, and financing structures designed around predictable powertrain lifecycles. Everything about how cars moved from manufacturer to customer was engineered for internal combustion.
EVs break that entire model.
When a manufacturer needs to spend triple the marketing dollars to move inventory, what they're actually revealing is that their existing sales infrastructure can't do the work. Dealers don't know how to talk about battery longevity versus engine rebuilds. Customers don't trust the residual value story because nobody has 15 years of used EV pricing data yet. Trade-in appraisals are guesswork. Finance departments are structuring loans for vehicles with different depreciation curves than anything in their historical tables.
So what happens? Marketing budgets balloon to compensate. You're paying premium dollars to overcome friction that shouldn't exist in a rationally designed system.
Look at legacy automakers versus Tesla's approach. Tesla eliminated the dealer network entirely. You might argue whether that's the superior sales model, but structurally, it's coherent. No dealer trying to squeeze service revenue from an EV. No confusion between what a franchise network optimized for ICE cars can actually support. The company owns the entire customer journey.
Legacy manufacturers can't do that without destroying franchise relationships that generate actual profit today. So they're stuck in an uncomfortable middle ground: selling a fundamentally different product through retail infrastructure designed for a different product, then using marketing spend as a band-aid.
This isn't actually about whether people want to buy EVs. Demand exists. This is about the cost of distributing them through a system that was never meant to handle them.
Here's where it gets interesting. The dealers aren't going away anytime soon. But the ones that survive the next decade will be those that genuinely restructure around EV economics. That means retraining sales staff on battery chemistry instead of torque specs. It means rethinking service revenue models when brake pads last 100,000 miles. It means having credible answers about charging infrastructure and grid access, not just horsepower.
The automakers spending enormous sums on EV marketing aren't making a sales mistake. They're making an infrastructure choice, knowingly or not. Every dollar spent on advertising is money that could theoretically go toward fixing the underlying system but won't, because that system is embedded in shareholder agreements and state franchise laws.
What we're actually watching isn't a marketing problem with EVs themselves. We're watching the growing pains of an industry trying to sell new products through old structures. The companies that figure out how to align those structures with the product will eventually spend less on marketing, not more. They'll get there by necessity, not choice.
Until then, expect the marketing budgets to keep climbing. Because as long as the plumbing doesn't work, you have to advertise harder to get people to turn on the tap.