Tesla’s L.A. showroom.
Tesla Motors, manufacturer of the premier-priced Tesla electric car, has opened a gallery at Tysons Corner. Too bad would-be buyers can’t actually purchase a car there. It turns out that Virginia law prohibits car manufacturers from operating their own dealerships. Writes the Washington Post: “The California-based company is using the Tysons Corner location as a showroom where employees are forbidden from discussing purchases.”
The state law is designed to “encourage competition and protect consumers,” says the Post. In actual practice, as Tesla amply testifies, the law protects automobile dealers from competition by manufacturers.
Tesla has petitioned for an exemption. What do you think its odds of success are in the state that often touts itself as “the best state for business?” Let’s check the Virginia Public Access Project and see which industry has more clout in Virginia: automobile dealers or automobile manufacturers.
Here are the numbers for total donations, 2009 through 2013:
Auto dealers — $3,401,230
Auto manufacturers — $152,027
A 22-to-1 ratio in favor of the auto dealers. End of story. If you want to buy a Tesla, you’ll have to purchase it online. Hmmm. I wonder who gets the sales receipts — Virginia or California?
Update: Jeff Schapiro at the Times-Dispatch writes about Tesla’s lobbying effort in Richmond to get an exemption to the auto dealers franchise law. His kicker: “Don’t expect dealers to give up easily. They’ll defend complex laws that cushion their bottom line. It’s a bottom line, dealers worry, threatened by their rare defeat this winter in the General Assembly: McDonnell’s $6 billion tax increase for transportation that relies, in part, on higher levies on car sales. Car dealers have no intention of losing — again.”
— JAB
