Evans family celebrates 100 years in the auto business

Jim Evans owns the Evans Dealer Group, which has an Infiniti dealership in Centerville and BMW and Volkswagen dealerships at 7124 Poe Ave.

Evans is clearly enjoying the centennial moment.

“The first thing that comes to my mind is how grateful I am to the members of my family who got involved in this industry and kept it going,” Evans said in a recent interview. “Also, I’m very fortunate to work with some amazing people.”

His family’s automotive advernture began in 1926, when Evans’ grandfather, L.P. Evans, “took a leap of faith that would shape the next 100 years of our history,” his company’s web site says.

That first family dealership was in the Miami, Fla. area.

What does it take to stay in business for a century?

“I would say the ability to recognize and adapt to trends quickly,” Evans said.

“The important thing is to really hire good people and put in the right processes,” he added. “If you do the right thing, then the right thing happens for us.”

Evans has weathered it all in the auto business. He is a third-generation car dealer who in the mid-1990s tried to retire from the auto industry. Evans sold his family’s Florida dealerships in 1998 to AutoNation, and he then served as a vice president for that company for seven years.

In 2005, Evans left AutoNation. He started investigating opportunities to step back into the business, and acquired his first Dayton-area dealerships in 2007.

He bought his Poe Avenue auto dealerships from Pete Zorniger in July 2007.

“It was dramatically different,” Evans said of the change between South Florida and the Dayton area.

Fast-forward to 2019, when the Memorial Day tornadoes — tornadoes that damanged so many local homes and businesses — tore through his dealership on Shiloh Springs Road.

“Got to the property and was literally ... shocked,” Evans told the Dayton Daily News in 2019. The dealership’s big sign had been toppled and cars were damaged in myriad ways.

Two years later, Evans sold his Volvo franchise back to Volvo.

Volvo wanted its franchises in cities with populations greater than 1.5 million. “We started having conversations,” Evans recalled.

“They offered me a decent price for it. It’s not like I fire-sold it.”

The decision was more than a year in the making.

In the fall of 2022, three years after the tornadoes, Evans sold the Harrison Twp. store for $7.25 million to the Bowling Green, Ky.-based Martin Management Group,

The landscape for automotive companies today is a challenging one. American tariffs against foreign imports exert a “huge financial strain on all three (of his) manufacturers.”

The demise of the federal electric vehicle tax credit also put a “damper” on auto sales, he noted.

Nevertheless, the family tradition persists. Evans’ son, James Scott Evans, runs the Infiniti store as well as the BMW and VW campuses. A son-in-law, Zack Field, is business manager at the BMW store.

“I’m not going to be around forever, even though my son thinks I might be,” quipped Evans, who is 64.

He also has a grandson, William Evans.

“Who knows? Maybe there will be a fifth generation.”