Car dealers block direct electric vehicles | Hacker News Reader

Car dealers block direct electric vehicles

slate.com

12 pointsjseliger7 comments

> In 17 states, it is outright illegal for car manufacturers to sell cars at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

It's actually more than that.. Direct sales are forbidden in 22 states and restricting to only Tesla's in 11 states.

https://pro.morningconsult.com/articles/electric-vehicles-di...

There is no legitimate reason for the government to prevent a domestic manufacture from selling vehicles directly to consumers.

>Car dealers, gas station owners, and building contractors, it turns out, make up the majority of the country’s 140,000 Americans who earn more than $1.58 million per year.* Crunching numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, data scientist and author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz found that over 20 percent of car dealerships in the U.S. have an owner banking more than $1.5 million per year.

Why is that?

Extreme amounts of regulatory capture. Americans don't even begin to comprehend how much of the apparatus of the government is used purely to make them not only buy and drive a car, but to pay exorbitant markups on that car, both up-front and over the long run with aftermarket sales. We don't notice it for the same reason why we don't notice the air we breathe.

If all that is true, wonder why we don't see more "kit cars" or build your own. Seems to be relegated to a few niches like drag racing and classic restorations. A downmarket kit car that you add your own sweat equity to seems feasible considering India sells fully manufactured cars for like $5,000

There's a wonderful YouTube channel where a gentleman extracts the guts of a Chevy Volt and uses them to electrify a DeLorean. (Great Scott!)

Watching the complexity, the time requirements, the expertise requrements, and the physical space and specialised equipment for a process like this should give you your answer as to why there aren't more kit cars anymore.

https://www.youtube.com/@BillCarlson/videos

Reply on news.ycombinator.com