None other than billionaire Warren Buffett could prompt the Texas Legislature to end its eighty plus year old policy of restricting the sales of new vehicles to third party dealerships, News Radio 1200 WOAI reports.
Tesla has been fighting for several sessions to get the law repealed. Tesla does not have a dealer network, and in Texas it is forced to open 'show rooms,' like the one opening at I-10 and Dominion Drive, where cars can be displayed, but not sold, or even test driven, because that would violate the dealership laws.
But lo and behold, the Oracle of Omaha blew into Austin last week, asking for what is called a 'carve out,' or a special exemption, because his Berkshire Hathaway owns a RV manufacturing company in Indiana, as well as dealerships in Texas, making it technically illegal for Buffett to sell his RVs at his Texas dealerships.
The Buffett bill passed a Texas House committee in a heartbeat, while the Tesla bill had been stalled for two sessions.
That prompted JoAnn Fleming of the Texas Free Market Coalition to cry foul, and demand that Tesla and everybody else get the same treatment as Buffett got.
"Get the government out of this business, and let's pass a level playing field for everybody," she said. "Lets get the government out of the middle of it."
Fleming and other grass roots and Tea Party groups say they have no problem with Buffett asking for permission to get around the Texas law. They say Buffett's lobbying demonstrates how the current law doesn't work and doesn't support business, innovation, and the free market.
"Our state Legislature and our state officials need to support the free market, stop picking winners and losers, and stop doling out corporate welfare in the form of perks," she said.
Open market groups like the TFMC who want the law abolished say it is outdated. They say innovation in the automobile industry is more and more being driven by companies like Tesla, Google, Apple, and Uber, non traditional auto firms which will not invest the time, effort, and money to establish a dealer network across the state just to sell their electric, and, eventually autonomous vehicles in the state.
The result, they say will be that Texas will simply be skipped by the innovators, which will market the next generation of vehicles in other states, leaving Texas as a backwater in technological innovation.
Texas is one of four states which has what is called a 'captive dealer law.' It was established in the 1930s, largely to make sure that automobiles were available in rural parts of the far flung state.
Lawmakers at the time were worried that, unless new car sales were restricted to dealerships that were not owned by the automaker, companies would sell their cars only in big cities, leaving the rural parts of the state in the 19th Century.
By incentivizing small town entrepreneurs to open dealerships, the law encouraged them to open dealerships to serve small towns and rural areas.