If at first you don’t succeed, change your strategy.
Tesla Motors’ Lone Star ambitions won the blessing of the Texas GOP at the party convention in Dallas this month, paving the path towards a possible end to the three years of drama over the electric car manufacturer’s right to sell in Texas.
It’s a dramatic incremental victory for Tesla in Texas, the nation’s second-largest auto market, coming less than a year after the state’s top Republican, Gov. Greg Abbott, told Bloomberg that Texas wasn’t interested in the California car company’s direct sales.
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The coming 2017 session seems poised to provide a breakthrough for Tesla, now that the company has courted the sentiments of Texas republicans.
With a booth at the party’s state convention in Dallas in May, a Tesla rep argued that repeal of franchise law amounted to a truer free market system. And the party agreed, adding a Tesla-friendly plank to its 2016 platform.
“We support allowing consumers in Texas to be able to purchase cars directly from manufacturers,” the addition said.
That will make it very hard for the state’s ruling party to continue to resist the years-long push when lawmakers convene again in Austin in January.
See here, here, and here for some background. Tesla has tried logic, and they have tried lobbyists, so why not try platform management? I hadn’t seen Abbott’s remarkable comment to Bloomberg before now – gotta love that commitment to free-market principles – but if he’s not on board with this, that’s a potentially significant obstacle for Tesla to overcome. Not impossible, of course, but that’s a challenge. I’ve often compared the Tesla/auto dealers fight to that of the microbreweries and beer distributors. That took multiple sessions, and a significant amount of grassroots engagement for the microbrewers to win the fight, even if it was a mostly qualified victory. While this action by Tesla is a step in that direction, I still feel like they haven’t done enough of it yet. We’ll see how it goes when the Lege reconvenes.
Tesla’s denied entry into Texas is a huge flag that demonstrates the difference between what Texas (R)’s CLAIM to be for, and what they are actually for. It’s exactly the same thing as Texas’ 3 tier liquor system. Cronyism. Hopefully, the same non establishment (R)’s that got Trump nominated will shame Texas into actually embracing capitalism, and letting Tesla sell its cars here, without a genuine, certified, independent auto dealer having to be involved.