Tesla Faces New Jersey Challenge as Rule Change Looms
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Deborah Dorman, president of the Eastern New York Coalition of Auto Dealers, was at that meeting and said Tuesday Cuomo aides told the group the governor would sign the bill if it passes.
She said the bill was designed to protect consumers because it required companies to create a storefront in the state and was not directed at Tesla because it sold electric vehicles. Some environmentalists have claimed the bill unfairly targets electric car manufacturers.
“Everyone is selling electric cars, it has nothing to do with that,” she said. “If you allow someone to come into the market with no overhead, that's an unfair advantage,” she said.
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/albany/2014/02/8540876...
Being more efficient than your competitors in NY state is apparently an unfair advantage.
The government should seek consumer input on this.
I'm completely unsurprised that Arizona and Texas, supposed bastions of capitalism, oppose a better form of business.
If they want something illegal, they'll torture the law until it agrees.
Imagine if that applied to the startup world: "Oh hey, you want to buy this SaaS product I built? Well, you can't sign up on my site, you'll have to buy from one of my SaaS distributors."
Madness.
I don't think this is going to be a big deal. If you own a fleet of cars (think rental car company), you can't technically buy from a manufacturer, but the standard loophole is the negotiations happen with the manufacturer, and the local dealer is the official seller and the dealer gets something like $75/car. Tesla should have no problem setting up a similar arrangement.
Never understood that.
1. Contact fortigate, they put a sales guy in touch with you. Ask him some tech questions, turns out he doesn't know anything. He gets a tech manager in the loop. Ask him, he doesn't know shit either, he gets one of his subordinates in the loop. Now there's 3 cc's on the email thread, and maybe they can tell you some details about the product.
2. They put you in touch with a reseller. A "relationship manager" at the reseller puts you in touch with a sales guy at the reseller. That sales guy tells you that you need a higher-end product than the one you expected, for twice as much money. You start questioning that, turns out he doesn't know much about the product and says "let me get fortigate back in on this" and pulls the 3 people from step 1 back into the email thread.
3. Now there's 5 people in the loop, with several of them arguing about what you need. Eventually it gets sorted, and the reseller ships you the thing you told them you needed a week ago.
.. all of this was to sell me about $4000 worth of hardware, total.
Now I'd understand their thinking if the reseller would just handle the customer relationship, but they had to pull fortigate back into it every time I asked a non-trivial pre-sales question, the kind any sysadmin would ask. Makes me wonder what all those "relationship managers" and sales guys are for.
The re-seller is obviously the under-performing part of your exchange, it should be their business to know what they are selling. Most likely it shows the current state of the market - not very many buyers ask these technical questions, hence the experience is not there for the reseller. If you'd want to feel better about it, at least the reseller you've dealt with now has some more knowledge of one of the products they are selling.
A lot of people don't understand that this isn't just high-end routers. It's actually all electronics.
Try to buy a motherboard directly from the manufacturer, or a monitor, or really, anything else.
The manufacturer will direct you to their sales wing, at which point, you will be instructed to buy from their approved distributors. Those distributors are large companies that work as middle men.
And then even those distributors will not sell their goods to you unless you have a reseller license and go through their application process.
In that case, Dell, Apple, Sony, and Microsoft must be morons. Because they sell directly to consumers.
It's not about simplicity or efficiency. It's much more efficient to sell directly to the consumer. It just takes an immense amount of resources that smaller manufacturers simply do not have. That's why medium/small sized manufacturers rely on larger middle men and retailers. Not because it's more efficient, but because they simply don't have a choice in the matter. They don't have the resources to go directly to the consumer.
> It just takes an immense amount of resources that smaller manufacturers simply do not have.
Requiring less resources is a form of efficiency for the manufacturer. Being able to simply ship to a single distributor vs shipping to many individuals and having the infrastructure to process those packages, is more efficient to the small manufacturers. It may not be on the wider economic scale but for small companies it saves a lot of work.
I'm shocked, shocked to find that New Jerseyans are capable of performing such tasks. Are you sure you're pumping it properly? :D
(Yeah, yeah, I know, I should STFU and move to Somalia...)
Full-service gas stations, on the other hand, are neither prohibited nor mandated in most states. They would exist if there was a market. There's not. End of story.
Then you'd be happy to know that in addition to having full service, Oregon's gas prices are ~$.40 per gallon cheaper than California's. Full service doesn't seem to be resulting in dramatically higher prices.
> Who is so lazy at they can't get out of their comfy seat for 2 minutes?
Who doesn't have better things to do with their time than inhale gasoline fumes?
California's gas tax is ~$.70 per gallon, Oregon is ~$.50. Now granted, California has roughly 3x the miles of roadway that Oregon has...[1] This probably explains why California's roads are atrociously bad and Oregon's are relatively pristine.
[1] http://blog.cubitplanning.com/2010/02/road-miles-by-state/
Oregon's standards allow it to buy from a far larger market.
This is actually one area where the refining industry wants federal regulation: they would vastly prefer to deal with a single set of standards for the whole country than tailoring individual plants to 50 different standards.
http://www.epa.gov/otaq/fuels/gasolinefuels/rfg/areas.htm
So the state specific requirements only really matter if they exceed the federal standards.
It's pretty likely that reformulated gasoline is effective in reducing smog (I think CO is the big target).
Which is exactly the case in California, hence the higher prices.
California has an interesting history with environmental legislation, as it had a clean air board before the EPA existed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Air_Resources_Board
There's no shortage of things they could be doing, but instead, we're paying them to stand around most of the time inhaling gasoline fumes. We could instead be paying those people to do something actually useful, like running fiber to homes and businesses, or delivering goods so that we don't have to travel, or a million other things that would increase our productivity.
And now you're being willfully ignorant. California has a variety of other regulations that lead to higher prices. But that doesn't change the fact that Oregon's gas-pumping regulation also leads to higher gas prices.
Way to be hyperbolic. Why not let the customer decide whether or not they want to do it themselves, rather than choosing what's best for them?
And surprise, surprise: in the 48 states where customers are free to choose, they overwhelmingly choose to pump their own gas.
It seems that it would actually be less convenient to have to wait for an attendant, especially when the station is busy. Unlike service from behind the checkout counter, the attendant must walk around to each car...at least twice I'm assuming...to start and stop the fuel? I'm not familiar with it.
I'm afraid I don't understand this bit (being European and all). Are you saying that not only there are attendants, but that you are forbidden from using the pump if an attendant is not available?
Sure, but we still end up paying less for gas than our neighbors.
Don't get me wrong, if it were up to me, this would be gone in a heartbeat ... but it's not the end of the world.
I don't even understand what the objection is.
I don't understand the objection to laws against cooking for yourself at home.
If it was cheaper to hire a Chef to cook meals, I wouldn't understand all the noise about making it mandatory either.
Bad analogy. If you want ammunition, I'll give you the following. Having an attendant pump your gas sucks because:
1. They screw up what type of fuel you want. Or how much of it.
2. When you yell at them to fix it, they have no idea what you're saying, because they don't speak English.
3. At a busy station, you have to wait for five minutes for them to even get to you.
4. And then you have to wait for another five minutes for them to come back and finish off.
5. If you have the tag you use to pay for gas on your keys ... well you have to hand your keys to a stranger. Same with a credit card, when you could have simply swiped yourself.
I can go on, but really, at the end of the day, this isn't a big deal. There are far worse things to complain about.
But my point is that it is indeed cheaper to hire a chef to cook meals -- in some cases, but that doesn't justify making it mandatory.
You're taking, as given, the claim that attended fuel pumping is cheaper -- but that's only true sometimes, just like with the home chef, especially if (as in my ignorant aristocrat example) you factor in opportunity costs, which was the point.
When people insist that attended fuel is cheaper in terms of sticker price ... well, that's dubious, but let's assume, for whatever reason, it is (maybe there are insurance savings?). It still has a higher opportunity cost for several reasons, many of which you just listed.
When I got back from my 2 year Alaska->Argentina drive I genuinely had to stop and think about what I was doing, unsure of how to proceed. It was a great novelty :)
I don't understand what is so unfair about it. Tesla is the one going into these states as a newcomer, they have an expensive product, they have to pay rent and hire workers. If these franchises want to complain, complain to the manufacturer they are representing.
The thing is these franchises don't offer enough value-added services needed justify the extra costs (or their existence). That is why they are afraid. They know this (this is why they have such a bad reputation from customers).
Also, cars are increasingly becoming more complicated. These hybrids being built now are so complicated that they require automated tests to be done to detect issues. As technology progresses, these franchises will increasingly rely on the manufacturer for assistance in solving problems that are not simple.
I think the real advantage to Tesla is that the feedback loop is faster. They can listen to customers and improve their products faster. Improving the products can further reduce the costs and increase it's competitiveness.
From a customer standpoint, they also provide a guaranteed location at which the car can be serviced. If you buy a common car like a Ford or a Toyota, you'll have your choice of mechanics. If you buy an import or a Fiat, your only option locally may be the dealer you purchased the car from.
As technology progresses, these franchises will increasingly rely on the manufacturer for assistance in solving problems that are not simple.
Yes, but if any such problem is severe enough that only the manufacturer can deal with it, they've got a mandatory recall issue, and the manufacturer would be forced to handle the problem. Car dealers usually have the best-trained (and first trained) mechanics for any model of car, pursuant to franchise licensing agreements.
real advantage to Tesla is that the feedback loop is faster.
In the real world, fast iteration for physical products is not a good thing. You end up turning any particular iteration of the car into a commodity, which lowers demand because buyers will want to just wait for the next iteration.
If it were really the slam-dunk win you claim it is, Tesla would probably have used dealers too.
Short version: the auto dealers are a powerful lobby group that prevent this from happening.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/02/19/172402376/why-buyi...
My only comment is that if Tesla gets to do direct selling then Ford should also be allowed.
It is a local power thing, and I don't agree with it, but I also don't think anyone should get an unfair advantage just because they are new. That doesn't promote competition.
It's in the interest of protecting jobs of automotive dealers in an industry Tesla is disrupting. Nothing more.
... Oh wait.
Mostly, transparent attempts to restrict services and rights from subsets of the citizenry. In either real attempts at discrimination, or cynical efforts that are doomed to fail at anything but driving up voter turn-out.