Tesla’s best innovation: buy direct from manufacturer
Actually, having a sole entity controlling all sales makes getting away with this criminal behaviour easier.
There’s less to compare to
There’s fewer people that need to be hush hush
You have much easier control over who comes in to the circle.
On the other hand, all it takes is one whistleblower employee at tesla to blow the cover on the entire operation if they’re up to no good.
That comes after you have bought the vehicle. At least in my case, in Norway, buying the car was painless and at no point did the sales rep attempt to persuade me to buy anything extra or do anything shady.
However, their service organization stinks at some locations in both in Norway and in the UK but oddly for different reasons.
When you walk into a Tesla dealership you know what price to expect, but that does not happen at other dealerships.
(I don’t own a Tesla)
> HB 637, "Motor Vehicle Dealers, Manufacturers, Importers, and Distributors," bans most direct-to-consumer vehicle sales if the automaker has ever sold any model through a franchise in Florida before (i.e. every major automaker). Manufacturers that didn't already have a dealership agreement in the state before the law are exempt, which includes Tesla and presumably other new EV brands such as Lucid, Rivian and Polestar.
[0]https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2023/06/16/e...
Also, a lot of what people dislike about dealerships is at least somewhat orthogonal to the fact that they're dealerships rather than something owned by the manufacturer. Any dealership can institute "no haggle" sales, you're going to have to take your car to a local authorized place for service/warranty work/etc. in any case, and a lot of people need financing.
The last few years of shortages notwithstanding, to the degree you can walk into a dealership, point at a car and say I want that one (or I've come to pickup the car I've ordered), I've got my checkbook--a lot of the hassle disappears. Yes, there will be various annoying upsell attempts but that mostly involves just saying no a bunch of times.
(Yes, there are some incentives that dealerships have that a manufacturer-owned entity might not. On the other hand, the inverse is probably true as well.)