Car Dealership Laws

The car manufacturer can undercut a dealership, because they have fewer costs. At the time these laws were written, having a dealership was vital to get timely repairs. In Tesla's case, timely repairs might still be an issue - you cannot get a general mechanic to work on them. Therefore, it was designed to ensure sales were locked into a repair system.

Car manufacturers are legally barred from owning dealerships, it’s the individual dealership groups who decide what to sell. Car manufacturers selling directly to the public decreased competition as the manufacturers didn’t have any incentive to undercut their own prices between dealerships selling their own products.

Dealers are a legally protected market in many states, which ban manufacturer-direct sales of cars. This is why in many states (including Texas), Tesla only has showrooms, not dealerships. (You need to fill out a purchase online and can't pick up any inventory from the, ahem, showroom.) No reason why Ford couldn't do the same, except that many dealerships which were independent are now owned by a few conglomerates who have a keen interest in preventing the loss of their b

It is also in part due to the explicit tie in of the dealership system by which we buy cars. Dealerships can't go away because they have baked the law around them. Automotive manufacturers are forbidden from building their own stores. Though this is a state by state issue, and Tesla is the manufacturer skirting this rule.

Car dealership analogy is flawed.In some states its illegal for the car manufacturer to directly sale to the consumer, they have to go through car dealerships.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_US_dealership_disputes

The dealership model is an anachronism from the days when the Big 3 US automakers were basically a cartel with a lock on the market, and predates the internet. For new sales it has no real advantages over what Tesla is doing, and for service the public would be better served by strong right-to-repair laws so people can have their vehicles serviced at any independent mechanic (or do it themselves).

Tesla never had dealerships, but GM and all the others did. These laws do exist, as you say, to prevent the manufacturer from cutting out the dealer after benefiting from the service the dealer provides to its customers, but Tesla never had any dealerships they could unfairly circumvent.

With all this lamentation about electronics stores of years past, nothing will compare to the malicious incompetence of car dealerships and service departments. Their business model these days is “if we all keep behaving badly together, consumers will have no choice but to accept our lies, markups, and chicanery”. The dealer groups paying politicians through campaign contributions to allow them to block manufacturer-direct sales (look up how you can’t buy a Tesla in Michigan, home of The Motor C

The dynamics in the US are different for a reason: Car dealerships are independently owned due to laws preventing car manufacturers from directly selling cars to consumers.This means multiple dealers (of the same car brand) compete with each other to sell you a car, thus driving their margin down. They try to make it back by selling you add-on packages and financing at the time of sale, ongoing service relationships, and handling warranty/recall issues (paid by the corporate brand).

In many states in the United States it is illegal to buy a car directly from the manufacturer or from a dealer owned by the manufacturer. In all states it is illegal for a manufacturer with an existing independent dealer network (which is to say, every manufacturer except the EV startups) to sell directly to the customer or to open a new factory-owned dealer.So companies like Ford can only sell what independent dealers want to sell. You can go to the dealer and ask to buy a car sitting