Rent-seeking Diary: State Dealer Franchise Laws and Tesla

By now you’ve probably heard that last week the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission passed a rule stipulating that automobile sales in the state cannot be direct-to-consumer, and must instead take place via dealer franchises. Tesla Motors was the clear target of this regulation, with its innovative electric vehicles and direct-to-consumer sales model. New Jersey is not the first state in which this regulatory tangle is occurring; last summer Tesla ran into dealer franchise law hurdles in Virginia and New York, as I discussed here in July.

The SF Gate blog post above notes:

Tesla said the administration had “gone back on its word,” claiming two top Christie aides had agreed not to move forward with the regulation. …

But a Christie spokesman rejected the accusations of a double-cross. The regulation, he said, won’t prevent Tesla from seeking legislation to allow direct sales in New Jersey.

Note that the political establishment response is to engage with the political process to get legislation passed to allow direct sales. What would such engagement entail? Will it entail the kind of crony relationships that have led to the entanglement of so many businesses and politicians in the past — will Tesla have to find its own politicians to fund in the hopes of a favorable legislative outcome? If so, that will vindicate my sad statement last July:

When innovative and environmentally correct meets the crony corporatism of existing legislation, is the entrenched incumbent dealer industry sufficiently politically powerful to succeed in retaining their enabling legislation that raises their new rival’s costs?

In New Jersey, it appears that the answer is yes, at least for now, as established car dealers cling to their old business model and hope to avoid being disintermediated. Tesla has thus far avoided the crony trap, and has instead focused on relabeling their New Jersey showrooms as “galleries” while encouraging customers to purchase the vehicle online. Will that legalistic sleight of hand suffice to enable an end-run around status-quo-protecting obstacles?

Alex Tabarrok discusses the Tesla-New Jersey case today, and analyzes it very usefully with a brief history of the evolution of state dealer franchise laws and how they served as a Coasean solution to an incentive problem:

Franchising rules evolved in Coasean fashion so that manufacturers could not expropriate dealers and dealers could not expropriate manufacturers. To encourage dealers to invest in a knowledgeable sales and repair staff, for example, manufactures promised dealers exclusive franchise (i.e. they would not license a competitor next door). But with exclusive franchises dealers would have an incentive to take advantage of their monopoly power and increase profits by selling fewer units at higher profits. Selling fewer units, however, works to the detriment of the manufacturer and the public (aka the double marginalization problem (video)). Thus the manufactures required dealers buy and sell a minimum quantity of cars, so-called quantity forcing. Selling more units is exactly what we want a monopoly to do, so these restrictions benefited manufactures and consumers.

Here Alex’s account dovetails with the history that Elon Musk provided in his open letter to the people of New Jersey on Friday:

Many decades ago, the incumbent auto manufacturers sold franchises to generate capital and gain a salesforce. The franchisees then further invested a lot of their money and time in building up the dealerships. That’s a fair deal and it should not be broken. However, some of the big auto companies later engaged in pressure tactics to get the franchisees to sell their dealerships back at a low price. The franchisees rightly sought protection from their state legislatures, which resulted in the laws on the books today throughout the United States (these laws are not present anywhere else in the world).

Musk’s letter is well worth reading in its entirety, as an eloquent and well-argued statement about regulatory and legislative entry barriers that enable incumbent firms to raise the costs of their rivals. He also provides a thoughtful and economically sophisticated (and accurate, I think) explanation for why they don’t want to sell Tesla vehicles through established dealers.

Here Alex adds another political economy detail of the economic leverage of the franchise dealers in the states — they provided jobs and their sales generated a large share of a state’s sales tax revenue, so politicians found it in their interest to shore up the state-level dealer franchise laws to protect the dealers. Thus a set of laws that initially benefitted both producers and consumers has evolved into industry-protecting regulation.

One other theme I’ve noted in the discussion of Tesla’s reaction to New Jersey cronyism is to criticize Tesla for the benefits it derives from government protection. Tesla’s business intersects with government programs in three areas: (1) taking a DOE-guaranteed loan of $465 million during the financial crisis, which has been paid back in full (and was smaller than the multi-billion-dollar loans to the Big Three); (2) the federal $7,500 income tax credit to individuals purchasing electric vehicles, from which all manufacturers of electric vehicles benefit and which is probably not decisive at the margin for Tesla’s high-income target customers; (3) revenue arising from the existence of a regulation-generated market for vehicle emission credits (ZEV) credits in California, in which Toyota and Nissan also sell ZEV credits to GM and Chrysler. I expect that being practical and not leaving money on the table is a sufficient motive to induce Tesla’s management to engage in those programs. But these benefits from government social engineering and regulation differ in kind from the kind of industry-protecting regulatory cronyism evident in New Jersey (and Texas, and other states forbidding direct-to-consumer car sales).

3 thoughts on “Rent-seeking Diary: State Dealer Franchise Laws and Tesla”

  1. Reblogged this on This Got My Attention and commented:
    A perfect example of crony capitalists using their friends in government to increase their profits at the consumer’s and other producers’ expense. I wonder how much money Chris Christie and other Joyzee pols will get for supporting their friends in the establishment auto sector.

  2. “their sales generated a large share of a state’s sales tax revenue”

    The cars would be sold and the tax would be collected, no matter who sold the cars.

    The mechanics, the detailers, and the other folks who work in dealerships would still have jobs no matter who signed their paychecks..

  3. Lynne Kiesling

    But you’re missing the “double marginalization” point that the original franchise agreements solved — if the manufacturer charges dealers a high price to acquire the cars that they then sell in-state, fewer cars will be sold, which will mean fewer jobs as well as less sales tax revenue.

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