The reason for the laws mandating dealerships was to have a local party accountable to local laws, i.e., for service, lemons, excess inventory filling up neighborhood parking spots...
Tesla is speedrunning several decades of automotive history to demonstrate why dealership laws became a thing in the first place.
It’s 2025, it is trivial to hold all businesses accountable in any jurisdiction they do business in, especially with how easy it is to freeze electronic money accounts.
You can’t even sell something to someone in a different state without having to remit various taxes, even if you didn’t step foot in that state. A car manufacturing multi billion dollar business sure as hell isn’t getting away with it.
I am also not sure how a dealership would have preventer Tesla from deleting crash data, and falsely claiming it did.
You can’t even sell something to someone in a different state without having to remit various taxes, even if you didn’t step foot in that state.
This is not true. Sales taxes have a threshold requirement before out-of-state retailers are required to collect and remit sales taxes for customers in a state. It's usually 200 transactions or $100,000. If you're doing that much business with a state, you can and should be able to handle sales tax. And if you don't want to deal with it yourself, you can use a third party service like Avalara or TaxJar to handle the sales tax compliance for you (rate calculation, remittance, and returns).
especially with how easy it is to freeze electronic money accounts.
That is actually very difficult to do in the U.S. Generally, freezing accounts is limited to certain criminal matters or regulatory violations. It doesn't happen in civil litigation. At most the judge can order withholding or garnishment if the penalized party evades payment of the judgment.
I am also not sure how a dealership would have preventer Tesla from deleting crash data, and falsely claiming it did.
In most states, you can just go to a local dealer (or service center) to recover data from a vehicle if you can't do it using a third party. It's generally quite rare to go to the automaker to pull data from a vehicle. That's a Tesla specific thing, except in rare situations where a vehicle may be so damaged that special expertise is required.