Georgia dealers want Tesla store shuttered for selling too many Teslas
sg.news.yahoo.com
sg.news.yahoo.com
What happened to free market economy? How are americans totally fine with a company being denied its ability to sell its product to its end users?
And it's probably the exact same people later chanting that Europe is communist...
"Their [those who live by profit] superiority over the country gentleman is, not so much in their knowledge of the public interest, as in their having a better knowledge of their own interest than he has of his. It is by this superior knowledge of their own interest that they have frequently imposed upon his generosity, and persuaded him to give up both his own interest and that of the public, from a very simple but honest conviction, that their interest, and not his, was the interest of the public. The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always in the interest of the dealers...
"The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order or men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Chap. XI, Part III, "Rent of Land: Conclusion".
This applies equally to companies and to revolutions.
(and this makes me wonder how will the life of Frank Underwood fare in the third season of House of Cards)
note: I have no idea if the source we're talking about is repeatable or verifiable.
Edit: from Wikipedia:
> An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"[1]), short for argumentum ad hominem, is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument.
Note that "irrelevant fact" does not really apply here since the political biases of an organization publishing a political index are very much relevant to the discussion.
For example: http://www.heritage.org/index/government-spending
The position that more government spending always means less freedom is a political one, as is their choice of growth curve.
> The scale for scoring government spending is non-linear, which means that government spending that is close to zero is lightly penalized, while levels of government spending that exceed 30 percent of GDP lead to much worse scores in a quadratic fashion (for example, doubling spending yields four times less freedom). Only extraordinarily large levels of government spending—for example, over 58 percent of GDP—receive a score of zero.
Let's take a look at labor freedom: http://www.heritage.org/index/labor-freedom and http://www.doingbusiness.org/methodology/employing-workers
Now we see that that economic freedom in this case actually means freedom for employers to exploit their workers, with negative factors like "rigidity of hours" being determined by paid vacation days. Yet nowhere are factors like regulations on non-compete and no-moonlighting employment clauses factored in. So again a political opinion on what freedom of labor means - the freedom to exploit labor rather than the freedom of labor to seek work or change jobs.
You are lazily dismissing their data and workings by attacking their character (politically bias) - the very essence of an Ad-hominem fallacy.
Economic freedom is a great predictor of GDP per capita. So there is some law of (human) nature down in there somewhere: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dX5-CL7Zaac/TZfhtnxCz0I/AAAAAAAAAa...
"The property rights component is a qualitative assessment"
They score the US as an 80. Based on their own ratings, I think the US should be a 90.
The [Fiscal Freedom] score is derived from three quantitative factors:
The top marginal tax rate on individual income, The top marginal tax rate on corporate income, and The total tax burden as a percentage of GDP."
That is pure ideological bullshit. Total tax burden as a % of GDP is an actual measure, but why is the only marginal tax rate that matters the top one? The difference in marginal tax rate is actually larger at other steps in the US Tax code, but they want to focus solely on the top one? Also, why measure the marginal corporate tax rate but not the effective corporate tax rate (as they correctly do for personal taxes).
The "Business Freedom" index is trying to measure how much regulation there is - which is what you would think this entire ranking is about. It does a pretty poor job of it, though I think this is a hard task.
It goes downhill from there. Thanks for the providing the link, it proves the original point that the index is ideological nonsense very well.
The methodology's way to assign numeric values to things doesn't relate to intrinsic things about the objects under study, but rather, is a numeric score reflecting the subjective opinion of the reviewer.
That something uses numbers doesn't make it objective, and this is a prime example.
Keep reading. They explain the intrinsic things that make up the numbers they assign to the objects. Eg:
"Each country’s property rights score is assessed according to the following criteria:
100—Private property is guaranteed by the government. The court system enforces contracts efficiently and quickly. The justice system punishes those who unlawfully confiscate private property. There is no corruption or expropriation.
90—Private property is guaranteed by the government. The court system enforces contracts efficiently. The justice system punishes those who unlawfully confiscate private property. Corruption is nearly nonexistent, and expropriation is highly unlikely."Those are subjective criteria, to decide if a country not only "efficiently" settles a matter, but it also does so "quickly".
Similarly, there's not a single country where we'd find there is literally "no corruption", which means it's just a subjectively strong form of "nearly nonexistent", or where we'd find there is "no expropriation" ever in its history, as opposed to it just being "highly unlikely" to happen to you.
These subjective differences account for the difference between a 90/100 and 100/100. So if your example was that only 10% of the score depends on the difference between a figurative "no corruption" and "nearly nonexistent" corruption, you've done a very poor job convincing me it's an objective test.
Ad hominem circumstantial points out that someone is in circumstances such that they are disposed to take a particular position. Ad hominem circumstantial constitutes an attack on the bias of a source. This is fallacious because a disposition to make a certain argument does not make the argument false;
Essentially, you can't discount everything a particular entity says because you or others perceive them as biased. If you disagree with their position, attack the position, not the person.
That's the way to deal with arguments from authority but some posters were very charitable anyway and gave more analysis than original claim deserved.
Ad-hominem refers to dismissing specific points/arguments based on who made them. Dismissing an argument from authority this way is actually correct way to handle it. The difference I hope is obvious. The other poster is wrong, misuses common terms and to top it is arrogant about it that's why he is downvoted.
Allow me to translate what tobinfricke said:
"The Heritage Foundation is hardly an objective source on the topic of the advantages of the so-called 'free market', considering the fact that they are an organization dedicated principally to promulgating and evangelizing the concept of the 'free market' (by which they essentially mean a market in which the regulatory structures that benefit incumbent businesses are preserved, but new regulatory frameworks that would affect the status quo are discouraged). Oh and, here's a link to some basic information on the topic.
If I were to say to you that Frito-Lay is not an objective source about whether Doritos are delicious and healthy, that does not actually meet the criteria for argumentum ad hominem.
It never existed...
I suspect that if such models were studied seriously, economists would have a much less rosy view of the wonders of the free-market economy. And the same goes for the benefits of a democratic system versus other forms of government.
Because lobbying is not the exception - it's absolutely standard.
A lot of popular debates come down to people treating a feedback loop as a straight line, and picking different points on the loop as starting points. Some examples: nature vs. nurture, lobbying vs. corruption, chemistry vs. thoughts (e.g. in cases of depression).
I don't quite understand why you think that a model which shows that lobbying government leads to economic inefficiency would lead to skepticism in the wonders of a free-market society. It seems like quite the opposite should happen.
Of course, in reality it's unlikely that anything would happen regardless of what the economic models showed. The fact that tariffs are inefficient has been widely accepted in pretty much every school economics for the last two centuries, but tariffs are still ubiquitous.
However, lobbying is not a problem of the free market. It's a failure of establishment of one.
If such models were studied, and one were actually trying to make a free market work, it would encourage a specific law that should have been installed with the separation of church and state: the separation of state and economy.
It should exist for the same reason the church is separated from the state, they can do nothing but corrupt each other.
Start with something along the lines of: 'the government may pass no law impeding free trade' and or 'the government shall have no power to regulate commerce' - and go from there. The interstate commerce act of 1887 was one of the first major anti-free market laws the US Government pushed through.
I might be misunderstanding you by thinking you just said that the government should never regulate trade; to dispel my confusion could you please explain how your idea of state/economy separation will handle coordination problems? How will it avoid tragedy of commons, or other race-to-the-bottom kinds of situations?
1) Fixing the commons by eliminating them - grant property rights to the users which align their incentives with a longer-term health of the "thing" and allow markets to emerge.
Free Market Environmentalism has a few examples of this working in the real world: http://www.amazon.com/Free-Market-Environmentalism-Terry-And...
2) Allow local communities to form their own rules on how to manage their own resources, and monitor each other.
Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom (winner of the "Nobel in Economics" by her life-long work on these issues) has empirical data of cases from Kenya to LA: http://www.amazon.com/Governing-Commons-Evolution-Institutio...
I think he sort of touches on that when he talks about how the approach doesn't work on a global scale. It's fundamentally similar: when it's one coal plant, you can deal with it, but how do you sue a million coal plants all over the planet each one contributing a small part? But I think it falls apart even at the local level when pollution from individuals becomes significant, as easily happens now.
This is just one possible solution, of course.
That said, the many-to-many transactions don't seem a problem to me considering that homes and roads are fairly static. AirBnB alone manages 375000 people sleeping on homes owned by another dozens or hundreds of thousands of people every single night.
This kind of transaction, on the other hand, would probably just happened once a decade, if that.
You're right that many-to-many transactions are workable in general. However, they're workable when both participants are willing. For pollution, only one participant is willing. The polluter doesn't want to pay damages, you have to force him. Many people can come together to force one entity to do something (class action lawsuits) and one large entity can exert its power to force many people to do something (government), but it's really hard for many people to force many other people to do something. When both the source of the pollution and the damage it causes is spread out, the cost of enforcement overwhelms the damages. Imagine a metro area with 100,000 road owners who are being held liable for pollution-related damages to five million local residents. How do the individual residents collect, when the individual road owners don't want to pay? Do they sue each one for 1/100,000th of 1/5,000,000th of the total damages in the area? Traditionally, this is solved by the local residents organizing and then exercising power through that organization, i.e. government.
What we have now is free pollution up to an arbitrary point where it becomes very expensive (because it is illegal). The obvious dominant strategy in the current system is to not care about pollution unless you are near the legal limit.
Even if we went straight to direct democracy (which I like in theory, as well as I like the idea of demarchy), the special interest with the biggest advertising budget would win.
I wonder, could an elected technocracy (by which I mean different governments and representatives for different spheres of influence) solve this by limiting both the tyranny of the masses and the influence of any one corrupt official? Or would whatever process controls the final budget still have enough power to corrupt the system?
I.e. economists would have a much less rosy view of the wonders of the free-market should be economists would have a much less rosy view of the wonders of NON-free-markets
Or am I misunderstanding you?
Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations: "Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power."
Later:
The exclusive privileges of corporations, statutes of apprenticeship, and all those laws which restrain in particular employments, the competition to a smaller number than might otherwise go into them, have the same tendency, though in a less degree. They are a sort of enlarged monopolies, and may frequently, for ages together, and in whole classes of employments, keep up the market price of particular commodities above the natural price, and maintain both the wages of the labour and the profits of the stock employed about them somewhat above their natural rate.
On bargaining power between labour and capital ("masters"):
The masters, being fewer in number [than labour], can combine much more easily: and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit, their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work, but many against combining to raise it.
...
We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and, one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of. Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy till the moment of execution; and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people. Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted by a contrary defensive combination of the workmen, who sometimes, too, without any provocation of this kind, combine, of their own accord, to raise the price of their labour. Their usual pretences are, sometimes the high price of provisions, sometimes the great profit which their masters make by their work. But whether their combinations be offensive or defensive, they are always abundantly heard of. In order to bring the point to a speedy decision, they have always recourse to the loudest clamour, and sometimes to the most shocking violence and outrage. They are desperate, and act with the folly and extravagance of desperate men, who must either starve, or frighten their masters into an immediate compliance with their demands. The masters, upon these occasions, are just as clamorous upon the other side, and never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combination of servants, labourers, and journeymen. The workmen, accordingly, very seldom derive any advantage from the violence of those tumultuous combinations, which, partly from the interposition of the civil magistrate, partly from the superior steadiness of the masters, partly from the necessity which the greater part of the workmen are under of submitting for the sake of present subsistence, generally end in nothing but the punishment or ruin of the ringleaders.
There are many more examples in Wealth of Nations: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm
As for modern economics and markets, there's Coase (eponymous theorem on market extermalties), Olson ("Logic of Collective Action"), and Akerlof ("The Market for Lemons") and a whole slew of other market failures:
What happened is a century of regulations, laws, and commingling between politicians, government in general and business.
The US is a heavily regulated welfare state. In this case the regulation is set up to benefit the ever expanding lust for power by the government, and to shield the government protected monopolies in each segment of the economy. Decades ago it was a mixed economy. A century ago it was a near-free market.
I've seen it called everything from fascism-light, to corporatism, to inverted totalitarianism. Whatever you call it, it's anything but a free market.
Too strong of a political instrument not to use for manipulation.
It's split up in 50 states plus DC. Thus you have all these patchwork set of laws.
It favors the local dealer easily as they get quite cozy with the state legislature and dictate terms. AKA a regulatory capture environment.
The Feds will not touch this issue as it's too much of a political landmine to consolidate the whole market to be regulated on a federal level. Everything else about the car except sales is consolidated (safety, design, emissions, etc)
This is the nature of the Untied States - 50 states doing their own thing as long as the economy is within the borders. See health care, insurance, funeral business, hairdressers, and so on.
The model has its pluses and drawbacks. Unfortunately we are seeing the drawback with Tesla.
The only option I think is for Tesla to focus on their online presence and in the long term people will develop habits of buying a car through that way. Then maybe finally the stupid dealer cartel will die off.
Then again, it might depend on the return policy. My wife buys tons of clothes online and returns all the stuff she doesn't like due to the retailer's free return policy.
This is obviously stupid, but if it's legal then it solves the problem of needing to try before you buy online. Well, mostly. Some people will want to try the actual unit they're going to purchase. A reputation for quality and a good warranty should be able to overcome that with time.
I'm not so sure about that. Regardless of the reputation of a brand, people have different tastes when it comes to cars. It's hard to know whether you'll feel comfortable driving a car, like the way it handles, and so on just because it has a good reputation, because different people have different tastes (which they may not understand well). I think taste is the main reason people test drive a few cars before buying, even if they know the reputation of chevy/toyota/tesla going in.
When I bought my most recent vehicle (a purchase I'm largely happy with), I asked the (young and apparently inexperienced) salesman about a couple of features and he gave answers which were clearly bullshit. He'd have done far better to state that he didn't know.
One was mis-identifying the front-bumper transport tiedown hook cover as a sensor. Not a big deal, but so obviously bogus, after the fact, that it left a negative impression on the overall experience.
So Georgia screwed the pooch on this. A newspaper in CA writes an article, and folks from the other 49 states get angry. Some folks may move out of Georgia. The lawmakers there -- no matter which party they are -- get embarrassed. They don't do that again. They probably retract whatever they did.
Compare that to a winner-takes-all system, where one party is in control. You have one adjustment, sometimes only made after years of fighting with the minority party. It doesn't work, or it's crooked, or whatnot. There are no comparisons. There are no other places to go if you don't like it. There is no pushback from all the political parties to make this go away. Instead it's just circle-the-wagons time.
This, and a few other stories in technology like it, are powerful examples of how a loosely federated and decentralized system can easily outperform every centralized system of governance there is. Cool stuff.
I do like the idea of a loosely federated and decentralized system as you say but nothing is perfect.
Could you clarify the pattern?
NPR had a report about the growth of licensing a couple of years ago: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/06/21/154826233/why-its-...
And it's also perfectly legal to develop iOS stuff without any license whatsoever, simply then it won't be distributed by Apple in it's store, and will be usable only on jailbroken devices. There's nothing illegal about jailbreaking devices nor about developing for them.
iOS development as such isn't a licenced profession, simply the main distribution channel is very controlled.
For examples the other way, consider electronics (there are some warranty regulations like rules around lightning damage in Florida, but I believe it's pretty minor by comparison) or aviation (the FAA handles just about everything, and local governments pretty much just leave it be besides taxing you if you keep an airplane in their jurisdiction and maybe set up some rules about noise).
As far as what causes an industry to fall into one category or another, it seems to be largely random, but I'd hazard a guess that a lot of it has to do with when the industry arose and how important it's perceived to be. The US started out with fairly powerful state governments and that power has been slowly shifting to the federal government ever since. You could probably get a medical license, or something at least vaguely similar from various states before the revolution, but by the time anybody cared about regulating airplanes, the feds were much more in charge.
New players like a free market economy. Existing players like laws that preserve the status quo.
An effective advertising slogan for "the West" during the Cold War, also a nice ingredient for speeches and trade pacts..
What happened was: The car makers used their position of power over the dealerships - power they had as a result of the free market economy, more or less - to screw them over. The dealers fought back with custom legislation.
It's been this way for 70+ years now. The "free market economy," then as now, turns out to be its own worst enemy.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/09/04/dealers-choice-...
Monkeys with sticks and rocks, if you will.
Are you saying the dealers were not within their rights to fight back and defend their piece of the supply chain? Or are you saying that using legislation was "cheating"? I'm a little confused.
This isn't free markets eating itself, it's the dangerous hazards of mixing free markets with an over-bearing state, that modern economies have chosen as the primary operating model. Aka Neoliberalism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
It ultimately results in: you can have a free market, but after you get to a certain size you have to have friends within the state.
Dude. You've just described free markets eating themselves.
That is by definition not a free market. A pure free market has no regulation. Free markets don't exist in the United States.
Well hey now there's always the crystal meth market.
Crystal meth being the vile stuff that no true Scotsman would ever use.
Have you even read Smith?
You have it backwards. The problem that we have today is a result of not letting the free market be free 70+ years ago. The article you link to says GM "forced" dealers into buying their cars during recessions despite having little chance of selling them. Bologna! They didn't force anything! The dealers had zero obligation to buy their cars. What should have happened is we should have let the free market destroy those dealers. Destroy the dealers that bought cars without being able to sell them.
And you know what? You know what would have happened if all of GM's dealers went out of business after being "forced" to buy their cars. GM would die! Good! GM needed it's dealers to sell their cars. It's a balancing act that the free market easily could have handled but the dealers and legislators took the selfish way out. We would have had direct car sales decades ago if it wasn't for anti-free-market legislation.
The moral of the story, let the free market be free and avoid the shit show that will always without fail happen as a result. (See: Uber)
Well, okay, but absent a time machine, you can't fix that. Any solution that starts with "well you should have thought of that before" has already failed. Mistakes happen; a system that can't tolerate mistakes is a system designed to fail.
And in this case, it was the actors within the market (the dealers) that decided to make the market less free. They did it out of their own perfectly rational self-interest, and damn the consequences. Something like that is always happening, will always be happening. The "free market" is always full of actors working to make it less free.
Bologna! They didn't force anything! ... GM needed it's dealers to sell their cars.
"Do what I want, or face an existential threat" is pretty much the dictionary definition of "force." The big auto makers were able to do this sort of cram-down because they apparently didn't value their dealers.
No person faced an existential threat from that. Businesses on the other hand face existential threats all the time. Every time you don't buy something from a business you are, by you definition using "force" against them because they could go out of business without customers.
Corporations are people, my friend.
Sounds like a great ad for more free-market solutions ;)
"Do what I want, or face an existential threat" is pretty much the dictionary definition of "force."
I'll concede that point, but the whole point of a free market is that you can't force anyone to do anything. If a deal isn't mutually beneficial then people don't agree to it. Simple as that. I use "force" everyday when I continue to not buy products from companies I don't like and help drive them towards change or extinction.
Sure, some people have more leverage than others, that is always the case. But that doesn't matter.
You're biggest mistake is thinking that it is bad when one party has a lot of say over another party (like McDonald's over their cashiers). It's not. That's called cutting out the middle man. If I can continue to do business without the little guys, or only need a few little guys anymore, I'm going to negotiate a less favorable deal with them or cut them out entirely. This is what drives progress. Eventually the big guy no longer needs the little guy, great! Cheaper products for everyone! As the big guy has more say, and it becomes worse to be a little guy, the little guys leave. A balance is reached. This is how free-markets operate. Creative destruction always hurts some people, but in the end we all prosper (when robots take all our jobs social assistance is necessary but the point stands)
Do you think GM would have negotiated such a bad deal with the dealers if the tables weren't beginning to turn in GM's favor? Of course not!
Er, no. The first and second parts of this sentence contradict each other. The people that are hurt -- often fatally -- do not prosper.
But not forcing out the middle man, no, never that.
Sure, some people have more leverage than others, that is always the case. But that doesn't matter.
Why would a rational adherent to free-market principles lift a finger to obtain the leverage in the first place, if it "doesn't matter?"
Do you think GM would have negotiated such a bad deal with the dealers...
Not sure what deal you're talking about. The dealership franchise laws were not a "deal" that was "negotiated." They were, ahem, something the dealers forced on the auto makers.
2. Doesn't matter in terms of morality, not in terms of best business practices.
3. The deal that said "buy our cars now in the recession or we won't sell anymore to you in the future." not the law that resulted: "manufacturers must by law sell to any official dealer and cannot sell directly"
The simple matter here is, Tesla needed to sell cars before the law could accommodate a manufacturer direct sales model. Hence an exemption was carved out, likely at the behest of someone influential, so they could.
Georgia automobile dealerships have way too much power in our state. They were able to shove through without opposition in the legislature a rewrite of taxation on automobile sales. They wanted all used car sales business to themselves and they nearly got it. Now even private party sales of used vehicles are subject to a tax of close to seven percent. Hence, you buy a car from your friend and go to get a tag, you pay that tax based on the assessed value of your car, not what you bought it for. This value is usually lower than trade in value to a dealer, but figure the shock when you buy a 20k car and you need to fork out 1400 for tags.
I am very sure this situation will get fixed quickly. The state wants to appear friendly to tech and manufacturing. Auto dealers, liquor, and cigarettes, are probably the most protected in Georgia but politicians bow to pressure in election cycles to the populace here.
note, the real fear is not Tesla, its that other manufacturers will get to setup stores too.
If that shocks you, you've never been to Denmark where you pay $36k in tax on top of the $20k for the car [0].
[0] http://www.copenhagenize.com/2012/10/danish-180-tax-on-cars-...
Example:
Citroen DS4 in Denmark, 274.000 kr (U$ 39.000)
Citroen DS4 in Uruguay, U$ 49.000
Supposedly Malasya is the 2nd most expensive country to buy cars in the world, and the Citroen DS4 is priced at RM 149,888 - U$ 47.000 (still less than in Uruguay)
and in Norway, the most expensive in Europe, it costs kr 283,900 (U$ 45900).
I think the only place more expensive than Uruguay is Singapore.
Sources:
http://autobuzz.my/2014/06/citroen-ds4-1-6-turbo-a-dashing-f...
http://www.citroen.no/Resources/Content/NO/PRISLISTER/Prisli...
The trade-in reducing the taxable value is also similar to New York, I'm not entirely sure how to make that fair for private party sales; but I find it a bit less concerning.
Potentially if you were to sell and buy a car within 90 days from each other, the sale price could be subtracted from the taxable value that you should pay.
The notion that if I want car x, in color y, with trim z, I have to shop around and "find one that exists in those options" is not something that should be on me as a consumer.
I'm sure dealerships will custom order a car for you, but that sounds like a pain in the ass and I'm sure they charge you more for the privilege of buying the 20-50k product you actually want.
What, are you saying I won't be able to upgrade to one-day shipping for $2.99?
You're referring to the dealership's working line of credit, which is just interest they pay monthly from time of vehicle delivery to sale. For most vehicles, this amount is negligible (unless its been sitting on the lot for months). You could theoretically get a deal on a car they can't move, but the long-term resale value will likely be lower because its an undesired model/color/etc.
And also the cost of the space taken by the car.
Open a fake mailbox company in another state. Sell them the cars at production cost, and let that company "import" them.
Actually open a dealership (using another company). This probably won't work, as there might be a lot of red tape involved. Possibly there is a limited number of concessions, or some other hurdle, otherwise they would have done that.
Using middlemen, put Teslas on eBay, Craigslist, etc.. Make it somebody else's problem to deal with.
My favorite: Don't sell cars at first. Just do car shows, Tesla parades, Nikola Tesla tribute parties, and so on. Visit schools and communities and tell people how good electric cars can be for the environment. Partner with schools and driving instructors to get kids to learn driving in Teslas. Get as many people as possible to test-drive one. That's the most important thing. Then just happen to have a iPad around so people can order one :-).
There might be a law preventing them from even selling them over the internet into many states - I don't know if the laws only apply to physical stores or not - but in this case they could fall back to relying on the black market. At least for a while, while they get the legislation sorted out.
Last but not least (and only half seriously) try to frame the current laws as "communist". I picture an ad with thin, sad people in fur hats, waiting in a long line for their car, with hammer-and-sickle ration coupons in their hands. Contrast it with happy free people riding around in their Teslas under the Californian sun. Unfortunately, that might even work.
In Denver's Park Meadows mall, on Sunday they have a big sign saying the State of Colorado prohibits them from "selling", so come on in and sell it to yourself.
Yet at the moment I don't think this really hurts them. If anything its giving them a ton of free advertising and building consumer goodwill. Tesla is a high-line brand. A status symbol. They are not impulse purchases in the way that mainline Fords, Chevys, Toyotas are (i.e. people buying because they need a car, any car, and they liked the color, etc). If you want a Tesla, you know that going in. You aren't going to buy a Leaf or a Volt instead because you think it looks pretty. You don't really even need to see one in a dealer showroom, and for what they cost, traveling a few hours to buy one is not a huge hurdle. Where I live, if I want to buy a new Porsche, a Ferrari, a Maserati, etc. I would have to travel several hours to the nearest city with a dealer.
So in essence, the law perhaps ambiguously states that you can not sell more than 150 cars in a year. The dealerships are interpreting this as "more than 150 cars in any 12 month span" whereas Tesla is interpreting this as "more than 150 cars in a calendar year". On its face, Tesla has the stronger argument.
If it's not calendar months, then it is almost impossible to make actual sense of. If you wanted to limit yourself to 150 cars per year regardless of the start and end months, then you have to limit yourself to 12.5 cars a month which makes a whole lot less sense. Even still, at the day level you then have to restrict yourself to 0.411 cars a day. Then the hourly level...
Things are made simpler if you aren't close to the limit, but what is the purpose of expressing a limit if you aren't intended to get close to that limit?
for example, let's say you have this sequence (assuming the law is 150/year regardless of calendar months:
12.5, 12.5, 12.5, 10.5, 14.5 , 12.5, 12.5, .....
Boom, you're over if you continue to sell at 12.5 a month. You can compensate for the 14.5 by having another month of 10.5 within 12 months of the 14.5 month, but then you are under the limit within a different 12 month period and can/should have another 14.5 month to make up for it. The pattern repeats itself...
The overall point is that this would be a very stupid way to express a limit and it is far from logical to interpret it that way.
How is this different than Dell disrupting PC sales 20 years ago?
I'm guessing Tesla wouldn't be near as successful without the direct-to-consumer model.
Maybe they could put terms into their hypothetical franchise setup to forbid franchises from also being dealers for other companies, or sharing sales staff/floor space with another dealership. I'm not sure about that though.
For Tesla, it's not significantly more important to their success than overcoming general disinterest in electric cars, figuring out how to manufacture batteries for less money, or any of its other business challenges.
Government corruption is not going to disappear any time soon, but we can still work to mitigate its effects in some areas.
e.g. why on Earth would anyone hate the existence of physical Apple stores, for example? (which fits the description of "a manufacturer vertically integrating all the way from building [PC's] to running stores.")
Tesla has never had a dealership network, so I don't see why this should apply to them. But that is why these laws came to exist.
For anyone who knows the ins and outs of the system.. What prevents a dealership from setting up a base in an unregulated state and selling new cars directly to consumers everywhere in The States using fixed pricing. No showroom, test drive or salesman costs. Just a website with a price and trucks that deliver the cars.
Is there no usage loophole created by interstate commerce? Aren't all these laws local?
When Tesla faces a ban in a state, they convert their stores to showrooms so people would still be able to see the cars.
Here is the existing unmanned heavy-lifter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaman_K-MAX#Unmanned_remote_con...
Can carry 6,000 lbs and the cost of $1,000 per flight hour total isn't a terrible price, it's far more expensive than just putting the vehicle on a truck for delivery of course.
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/kmax.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukogay1TwAA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qqUdfSRFXw
The way those rotors cross are insane.
The BlackHawk unmanned system has been in testing for several years also.
Guess who wants to stop the state EV tax credit bill? Shouldn't come as a surprise that it's the same dealer lobby [2] mentioned in the Tesla article.
1. http://cleantechnica.com/2014/02/13/1-nissan-leaf-market-atl...
2. http://m.bizjournals.com/atlanta/blog/atlantech/2014/02/bill...
There actually was some debate over selectively cancelling franchise contracts during the GM and Chrysler bankruptcies.
But to get most people to care, you need to show them the alternative. Economic theory, valid or not, doesn't breed outrage.