My question: Why autos, but not other consumer goods? Should I be restricted from buying an iPhone from an Apple store, rather than Greg’s Phone Emporium?
Now days other laws pretty much make this a non-issue although you could argue that the repair/service process for Tesla's is exactly what these laws were intended to prevent; who would want to own a Tesla dealership if you can't get the parts to fix your customers's cars? e.g. Your son's basketball coach is going to keep calling until you get his car fixed.
In your example, you would be restricted to buying from Greg's Phone Emporium because Greg is thought to care more about repairing your phone than Apple.
Edit: The biggest issue with the current dealership system is that it, of course, just evolved into rent seeking and over-complicated purchase process. The auto companies have systems to make sure dealers sell cars no matter what and the dealerships have ways of extracting extra profit from their customers.
Local people close down their local businesses all the time, though. In fact, the manufacturer, because of vertical integration, is more likely to make profit than independent dealer, and so less likely to close down.
Just like foreign countries levying fines on "evil foreign tech companies", it was an older attempt at rent seeking from the "foreign" faraway auto manufacturers.
the guy who owns the local car dealership runs the town. he's got money unlike anybody else in town does. some towns have rich farmers, or rich people who've made their money elsewhere, but unlike them the guy who owns the car dealership knows that his revenue stream depends on maintaining a good relationship with the town, and so he spends money like nobody else does. every local event, sports team, church function, whatever, it's always sponsored by at least one car dealership. and every congressperson who represents one of those districts knows that they really don't want to get on the wrong side of the car dealers.
Apple only dreams of having as much distributed local political power as the car dealers do.
When car companies got their start, it was difficult to scale what we know dealerships do today: advertising, service, sales, inventory management, order management. It was cheaper for ford to use a dealer and have them worry about these things, than to perform their own local market analysis for things like advertising and operate their own dealership.
Eventually, dealerships saw that the writing was on the wall, and that one day these auto manufacturers would become large enough to operate their own dealerships themselves. They ended up lobbying for a law that made direct car sales illegal, and won, codifying their industry into law.
Given how bad Apple are about third-party repairs, yes. This law should extend to anything that's complex enough that it can only be repaired by a specialist.