> Dealerships should not exist and only exist due to terrible laws making it illegal for most automakers to sell direct.
Dealerships exist because the automakers wanted them, and those laws exist due to the automakers' foul play.
Automakers want to make cars. They don't want to manage stores, deal with thousands of different municipalities' rules for selling and registering vehicles, repair vehicles they've already sold, or store millions of cars in inventory until they're sold. They let someone else do all that, and it lets them run their factories at a nice even pace with essentially guaranteed buyers for their output.
Automakers did, in the 1990s, start to get jealous of the money their dealerships were making on the back of their products. Ford and GM both opened factory stores competing directly with their own dealers. They knew just where to open those stores and what to sell at them, because they had full knowledge of where their successful dealers were, and what they were best at selling at those dealerships. The franchisees were taking all the risk in selecting sites and financing inventory just for their franchisor to swoop in and undercut their business with their own store next door.
That unfairness is what led the dealers to lobby for those state laws banning the automaker from competing with its own franchisees.