I had a customer last week who drove 90 minutes to look at an EV specifically because someone at a competing store told them they qualified for a state rebate. They did not qualify. Wrong utility territory by one county line. That deal died on my desk and I spent 45 minutes on the phone trying to find an alternative before giving up.

F&I used to be the part of the deal where we added value. Now it is also the part where we deliver bad news about incentives that the sales floor already half-promised. The coordination problem between what sales tells a customer upfront and what actually survives due diligence in my office is getting worse every month.

Nobody at the OEM level has given us a clean, current, state-by-state reference we can actually use in real time. What we have are PDFs from three months ago and a website that has not been updated since the policy changed.