So where does the dealer live? In the current model, most of them live in NJ. Which means they spend that money in NJ.
Tesla's "dealer" lives in CA.
GM's "dealer" lives in MI and Italy.
Honda's "dealer" lives in Japan.
Hyundai's "dealer" lives in South Korea.
BMW's "dealer" lives in Germany.
Mercedes' "dealer" lives in Germany.
Toyota's "dealer" lives in Japan.
Ford's "dealer" lives in MI.
Suburu's "dealer" lives in Japan.
and on and on and on: Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin, Audi, VW, Cadillac, Fiat, Jaguar, Kia, Nissan, Porsche etc.
I don't know how many dealerships are in New Jersey, but let's say there's 1,000. You give Tesla the ability to sell direct to consumer, then everybody else will want to do the same. Franchise dealerships don't get their contracts renewed and every car maker moves to direct to consumer. Congratulations State Legislator jonknee, you've just cost New Jersey a minimum of 1,000 very lucrative jobs.
To give you an idea of how important 1,000 jobs are to a state economy, when Alabama was fighting for Hyundai to come open up a plant for 2,000 workers, with an average salary of just $40,000, Alabama offered around $253 million in incentives or over $115,000 per job. This is because of all the economic activity having just 1,000 employees running around with cash in their pockets would create and the network effects therein. Over 5 or 10 years, Alabama is set to make up that investment in spades.
I don't know how much your average car dealership owner makes, but I bet it's quite a bit over $40,000. I bet a 1,000 out of work bankrupt dealership owners is a pretty big slice of state economic pie. Over 5 or 10 years, I'd hazard they represent way more than $253 million in activity to New Jersey.
So congratulations, you've just cost New Jersey hundreds of millions of dollars in GDP and economic activity just by counting only the dealership owners and not all the rest.
Now you and I both know that when you go to 47 in Vineland, and there's mile after mile of car dealerships. They don't just have 1 or 2 sales guys. Each of those places employs a dozen to two dozen sales guys. A dealership can do that because they don't pay these guys almost anything except commission, so they can afford to keep a bunch of them around, grooming their power ties. So let's say there's an average of 12 sales guys for New Jersey's 1,000 dealerships or 12,000 people employed just selling the cars.
Well a Tesla style dealership doesn't want high pressure commission only power tie wearing salesmen. They want "car information experts". So they hire say 4 guys to mill around and direct potential customers to the interactive information kiosks. Let's say NJ is able to get all 4 of these guys from the pool of current car sales guys. What happens to the other 8?
So we have about 8,000 guys out of work. Congratulations. Let's use Alabama's model, you've just cost New Jersey a few billion dollars in economic losses. And now all those food trucks and restaurants and tie shops have to figure out how to get by with 1/3rd the number of customers. So that's even more people out of work and more economic losses.
How much economic damage are you willing to cause New Jersey, legislator jonknee, just so consumers don't have to haggle a bit when they buy a car every 7 years on average?