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Elon Musk Addresses New Jersey's Tesla Store Ban
An anonymous reader writes "On Tuesday, we discussed news that New Jersey is trying to ban Tesla stores, which would force the company to sell through car dealerships instead. Now, Elon Musk has prepared a response: 'The reason that we did not choose to do this is that the auto dealers have a fundamental conflict of interest between promoting gasoline cars, which constitute virtually all of their revenue, and electric cars, which constitute virtually none. Moreover, it is much harder to sell a new technology car from a new company when people are so used to the old. Inevitably, they revert to selling what's easy and it is game over for the new company. The evidence is clear: when has an American startup auto company ever succeeded by selling through auto dealers? The last successful American car company was Chrysler, which was founded almost a century ago, and even they went bankrupt a few years ago, along with General Motors. Since the founding of Chrysler, there have been dozens of failures, Tucker and DeLorean being simply the most well-known. In recent years, electric car startups, such as Fisker, Coda, and many others, attempted to use auto dealers and all failed.'"
It's not so cut and dry. The difference in price of gasoline in these two states matches up almost perfectly with the difference in state tax rate. Take out the taxes and gas costs the same (which would still suggest that NJ customers don't really pay any extra for full service). NJ charges about 14 cents per gallon while PA charges 40. The current difference in sale price is 28 cents.
Tax rates: http://www.iftach.org/taxmatrix3/choose_tableq2.php
Average prices: http://www.gasbuddy.com/GB_Price_List.aspx