Banning Tesla

In my last post I wrote about causes of death and injury in America. One of the things that resonated with me was the number of deaths (over 30,000 per year) and injuries (around 2.3 million per year) from car accidents. While this is a huge improvement from the numbers just a few years ago, we obviously have to make driving safer. Which begs the question; why did Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Texas, New Jersey, Michigan (I'm disappointed in Rick Snyder, but I don't blame him, it's career suicide to go against the big 3 and the "we need to save the automakers" mentality), Maryland and Virginia all effectively ban the company (Tesla) that made the safest car ever (according to NHTSA testing)? 

If you guessed something to do with lobbyists and political contributions, you're absolutely right. The issue in dispute is Tesla's sales model. They sell directly to the consumer from their small showrooms which seem to be modeled after Apple stores. Car dealerships are not really worried about losing business to Tesla. Only a small segment of the population can afford one, they only produced 35,000 cars in all of 2014. Compare that to the 2,480,942 sold by ford alone and you see how insignificant they are to the overall industry.

What is it that they're worried about? They claim to be worried about the precedent. That GM, Ford and Chrysler will realize they can copy Tesla and cut out all the car dealers. That sounds more than a little far-fetched to me. They also claim that car dealerships have such investments in their communities, so they care more about them and offer better service. Even if you buy into their first claim, that doesn't make the second claim true. Why would a dealership owned by a car company care less about their customers? 

It seems to me that what this is really about is protecting themselves and their profits from higher demands made by their customers. If people see that they can walk into any Tesla store and buy a car at the same price and pay the same amount for service at any store, with transparency, they may wonder why other dealerships make the whole process so difficult and muddled. If you've ever bought a car, you're undoubtedly familiar with the sales games that go on("My manager is so mad at me for giving you this deal (even though it's $2,000 higher than the dealer a mile away), you better take it before he changes his mind") and the maintenance/repairs are even worse. 

To tell you the truth, I'm a little sympathetic to their concerns about cutting out the middleman. My father is a computer reseller and when Dell came out with their direct to consumer sales model, it practically eliminated all reseller profits on computer hardware. The result of that was that prices for computers dropped drastically and more people were able to afford them. Resellers had to change their business model to either make up for the lower margins, with higher sales volumes, or sell services instead of hardware. 

If the computer industry had the same laws that the Auto Dealers have successfully lobbied for, there would be no Apple stores and  more depressingly, no Microsoft stores. Jokes. If the government is going to be involved at all, it should be to increase Tesla sales and make them more affordable for the average consumer. If that happened, it wouldn't take long for the other car manufacturers to add the safety and technology features that Tesla already has. Tesla does not have a monopoly on ingenuity and I wouldn't be surprised if one of the other manufacturers came out with a car fairly soon that improves on just about everything that Tesla has. In the meantime, let the people buy the cars they want and let me keep dreaming about being able to afford one (I like to pretend that the reason I don't have one yet, is that I'm waiting for longer battery life).

In case you don't know what all the Tesla hype is about, check out this video. If you can get through Elon Musk's geekiness (I really like watching him talk, b/c he's so excited about what he's saying), it pretty cool. If you can't, here's a short summary of the Tesla model S  features:

• Completely battery powered, no gas at all. 
• Automatic emergency braking, blind spot warning, lane departure warning.
• Traffic-aware cruise control, automatic lane centering, self parking.
• Autotpilot (some features not available yet): automatically follows the road, steering around curves and varying its speed to match the flow of traffic.  Automatically change lanes by tapping the turn signal. Parks itself, on private property it can even pull into and out of your garage without you being in the car. 
• Uses radar, cameras and sonar to protect you from objects you can't see. The cameras can see stoplights, red lights and speed limit signs and take action based on those. 
• Two trunks (there's no engine)
• 250 mile range.
• Stereo that goes up to 11. It's cute and most people will like that, but I have an OCD thing about radio volume numbers and just knowing that it goes up to 11 might be enough to keep me from buying the car.