Due to Tesla's recent troubles in selling cars its come to the public light that not only are cars in the U.S. primarily sold through car dealerships, in many states this is required by law. How did we get here? Specifically how did these two scenarios come to be:
Cars are sold primarily through dealerships instead of car manufacturers.
Laws are written in many states requiring that car sales go through dealerships and banning car manufacturers from selling cars directly.
I came here since a cursory search through Google and then Reddit did not give any answer to this question. I was hoping someone in /r/AskHistorians would know, or at least know where to find someone who would know (maybe another subreddit).
Car dealer here
The laws are largely state by state, however this is basically the story:
Car dealerships didn't start out as car dealerships. They where normal businesses that acted like middleman between say Ford and the consumer (i'm going use ford as an example). So say you wanted to buy a Ford product early in the last century. Well you would go to your local department store/hardware store/pretty much anywhere and talk to a guy and order your car. Which would then be shipped to the dealership and done!
Now of course there was a shipping charge, and Ford in this example was undercutting their business partners by selling directly to the consumer. At this point the various partners lobbied their local state legislators to ban (in my example) Ford from selling directly to consumers, they argued largely the following points
Since then all 50 states have followed suite and now you cannot buy a car directly from the factory...which I would argue benefits the consumer in more ways then if it was factory direct.