But then you have a dealership - or something that is functionally the same as a dealership. You have a fixed location that customers can go to buy cars on the same day, which are stored locally as existing inventory.
This is not just semantics. The material difference between Tesla’s showrooms and a dealership is the absence of inventory. That’s the main service that a dealer provides to a manufacturer - they purchase and store lots of vehicles locally to the customer, so that they’re available for purchase. Tesla’s showrooms don’t have that. Once you add it in, those showrooms have all of the relevant elements of dealerships.
That’s important in this discussion because…well, if Tesla showrooms are doing all the same things that conventional dealerships do, what then is the competitive disadvantage of incumbents’ dealerships?
In fact, the reverse may end up being true. Tesla may find itself in a problematic situation by its own legacy business model. I’m a zoning and land use lawyer, and I represent a number of auto dealerships - and one of the things we do for them is try to help them solve for more inventory parking, which is often a significant constraint for them. There’s almost never a large amount of “excess” parking spaces nearby that can be used for dealer parking. You can’t just go out and “work with” another business to get those spaces. In nearly all jurisdictions, it’s not legal to convert parking spaces from customer or employee parking to auto storage for dealers, and there’s usually no way to secure them. I do a lot of work getting warehouses approved for Amazon as well, and their warehouses do not get built and designed with excess parking.
So - Tesla has all these showrooms that are well designed for the “old” way of selling EV’s (online only with at least a 2-6 week delivery delay), and which can’t be adapted to the “new” way of selling EV’s once the market matures (have to find land for large numbers of vehicles stored locally to the market). Certainly not a disadvantage for legacy manufacturers (who already have the necessary inventory space in hand through existing dealers), and possibly a disadvantage for Tesla.