I wish them better luck this time, but I wouldn’t expect anything to come of it.
Proposals to allow direct car sales in Texas stalled during the 2013 legislative session, but the Pala Alto, California-based automaker appears poised to rev up efforts to revive the issue as lawmakers head back to work next month.
“We’re not asking to blow up the franchise dealer system,” said Diarmuid O’Connell, Tesla’s vice president for business development. “We are looking for a narrow and reasonable window to be able to promote this new technology ourselves.”
No one has pre-filed a bill promoting direct sales yet, and few in the Legislature have publicly supported the idea. But outgoing Gov. Rick Perry in March called the state’s laws “antiquated” and said it was time for “Texas to have an open conversation about this.”
Of course, Perry said that when Texas was still one of four states in the running to get Tesla’s new battery factory, which eventually went to Nevada. Perry prides himself on being able to woo job creators, and at the height of his Tesla charm offense during a June visit to California, he even drove the company’s Model S around Sacramento.
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Texas Automobile Dealers Association lobbyist Robert Brazie said he believes bills promoting direct car sales will likely be filed before the end of the 2015 legislative session, but that he expects them to garner little support. He said an offer of future Tesla investments would carry little weight in the state, because “when they had a chance to come to Texas, they didn’t.”
Brazie added that Tesla explained its choosing Nevada by pointing to “geography, cost and speed of development,” reasons that had “nothing to do” with either state’s car sales laws.
O’Connell admits that getting the law changed won’t be easy.
“Does the fact that we didn’t site the factory there complicate things? Absolutely,” O’Connell said. “But we’re going to be doing a number of big battery factories in the coming years and we’re going to need new vehicle factories as well, and there’s a certain logic to doing those in Texas.”
See here for past blogging on Tesla. I agree with TADA lobbyist Brazie that one or more bills to allow Tesla to operate will be filed, and I agree that they will go basically nowhere. That’s about the extent of my agreement with TADA on this, as I think they are completely in the wrong. Be that as it may, I’ve previously compared Tesla’s efforts to those of microbreweries, and one implication of that is that I expect them to need several sessions to really get traction on this. Some kind of grassroots outreach would be a good idea for them, too. I’ll keep an eye on this going forward.