How do Colorado legislators justify the bill which allows all?
How do legislators justify most of the laws that they pass? Welcome to the messy world of politics where legislators can be bought and strange and twisted compromises made that make no sense. My read on this is as follows: First, dealers are a pretty powerful lobbying group. They have established franchises that basically give them a monopoly over a certain geographic area, which is pretty much how franchises work, so no huge problem there. But over time, they grew pretty powerful and created statewide (and nationwide) dealer associations that they used to influence politicians. As a result, a whole mess of laws got passed in each state to protect the dealer networks from the manufacturers. Perhaps there was a good reason for those laws at the time, and perhaps there still is. Who knows. But along comes Tesla who doesnt have any dealership franchise system to be protected, and they want to sell their product directly to customers. In a free market system, there should be no problem with this. But dealers and legacy automakers alike see Tesla as a competitive threat. First of all, they dont have to split profits between the automaker and the dealer. Second, their products are actually superior to what the legacy automakers are putting out, putting the dealerships at a competitive disadvantage (at first, at least, their products were also ridiculously expensive, so it wasnt a huge threat, but they saw the writing on the wall). Sure, dealers attempted to spread propaganda such as characterizing the laws as saying that manufacturers werent allowed to sell directly to customers, even though most laws didnt actually say that, and that wasnt the original intent anyway (in some cases they actually got the laws changed to actually say that!) They also make the claim that dealers somehow are consumer advocates that fight for their customers (yeah, righttell that to anyone who has had to negotiate when buying a car!) So in many states Tesla has been given special permission to open a limited number of stores, galleries, delivery centers and service centers (as if they actually need one). Colorados case is one of those where the state auto dealers association got the law changed (after Tesla had opened up their sales center, and was thus grandfathered in), which basically slammed the door on all other new entrants into the market. In other words, for as much as they claim they are consumer advocates, they lobbied for (and won) an extremely consumer unfriendly model in which they require all consumers to go through them to purchase vehicles. So the bill in question would open the gate back up for EV automakers to sell direct to consumers. One could argue that the way it should have been written would be to allow direct sales only if a given automaker did not already have a dealer network, but since dealers basically have zero interest in selling EVs, this additional opening for all EVs is somewhat justified. As to your point about whether it excludes some manufacturers, its not really the manufacturers, but the kind of cars they sell. This law would cover EVs only. If a given manufacturer isnt selling EVs, then on the one hand there is not really a disadvantage because they dont have a product in that segment anyway. Although I should note that if there is a manufacturer that doesnt have an EV to offer at this time, then they are way behind the 8-ball. One last comment on the whole dealer consumer advocate point. I get that dealers feel threatened by Tesla and other EV makers. They are making products that frankly are a real threat to traditional autos, especially now that the cars they are producing are becoming more affordable. But if they have the automakers ears like they say they do, they should be demanding competitive cars because thats what customers want. So why arent they saying this? And if the response is that customers dont want EVs, then what are they worried about this law for?