“First, more on the short answer: Yes, Musk could easily work with franchise owners if he really wanted to. But if you're a manufacturer, you cede a lot of control to the dealership when you hand over your cars. As anyone who's haggled for a car knows, dealers have a lot of power to set prices. They can give customers a bad experience — causing folks to walk away, vowing never to buy a Volkswagen or a Toyota again.
‘Our stores are as much education venues as retail venues — in fact, probably more so,’ said Diarmuid O’Connell, Tesla's vice president of business development, in an interview Wednesday. ‘We don't think that we would succeed using an intermediary model where we sell a product that someone else sells to the public.’”
I can see another problem for the dealers and independent mechanics in the future. An electrical engine is so simple and durable that the car owner will only need to replace the tires and brakes every say-50K miles and replace the battery every 5 years or more. The battery is where the technical break through has to happen.
Tesla aside, corporate-owned outlets for everything is the seemingly inevitable capitalist outcome.
With auto dealers of all kinds, there’s just not as much profit in it as there used to be, so the outlets end up in the hands of the deepest pockets.
I still think Musk is just trying to keep hidden how little actual profit there is in his vehicles.