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Car dealers and electric vehicles: At a blowout party for unsung GOP heavyweights, the men were drunk—and anxious.

Share Comment The party was on at a gathering of unsung Republican heavyweights, and I was in search of the armadillo racing. The booze was flowing: Open bars numbered in the double digits, plus metal bathtubs teemed with beer on ice. Cover bands played and DJs spun. There was line dancing and trick ropers, twirling lassos and mechanical bulls, bucking riders and stilt-walkers. And there were car dealers—thousands of them. So many gray blazers atop so many pairs of jeans, so many corporate logos embossed on so many fleece vests. So many, many men. This year’s blowout was in Dallas and the invite called for “Western duds,” so there were omni gallon hats and dinner-plate belt buckles too. This was opening night of the NADA Show, the annual convention of the National Automobile Dealers Association, one of the most powerful trade organizations representing one of the richest professions in America, and there was much to celebrate. The years since COVID hit had been some of the industry’s best ever. Supply-chain issues had sent prices skyrocketing. New car prices were up; used car prices were up even more. “This has been an unexpected bonanza for new car dealers,” George Hoffer, professor emeritus of transportation economics at Virginia Commonwealth University, told Time late last year. Only a few months prior, the research firm Haig Partners clocked average gross profit for dealers at 180 percent over 2019 levels. Really, the past hundred years had been great. Auto dealers are one of the five most common professions among the top 0.1 percent of American earners. Car dealers, gas station owners, and building contractors, it turns out, make up the majority of the country’s 140,000 Americans who earn more than $1.58 million per year.* Crunching numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, data scientist and author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz found that over 20 percent of car dealerships in the U.S. have an owner banking more than $1.5 million per year. Advertisement And car dealers are not only one of the richest demographics in the United States. They’re also one of the most organized political factions—a conservative imperium giving millions of dollars to politicians at local, state, and national levels. They lobby through NADA, the organization staging the weekend’s festivities, and donate to Republicans at a rate of 6-to-1. Through those efforts, they’ve managed to write and rewrite laws to protect dealers and sponsor sympathetic politicians in all 50 states. All of which meant that this year, presidential hopeful Nikki Haley and Fox News darling Greg Gutfeld, among others, had made the pilgrimage to kiss the key ring. But just as times are strange for Republicans, they are for car dealers too, and the event this year had a decadent and desperate energy. Opening night featured a concert by country star Brad Paisley. He was set to take the stage in mere minutes, and I still hadn’t found the armadillos. I’d sidled through the “speak-easy,” happened upon the blackjack tables, and even run smack into a male dancer standing atop a saddle swinging 4 feet off the ground. But the small mammal racetrack eluded me. Get on the list. Slate’s evening news & politics newsletter. <div class="slate-notification--error"> Please enable javascript to sign up for newsletters. </div> Email address: Send me updates about Slate special offers. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms. Sign Up I pushed through crowded hallways, my path lit by the luminous logo of prodigious subprime lender Ally Bank. I rounded a corner, past a room full of ax throwers, and finally came face-to-face with a donkey. He was freighted on both sides by coolers full of beer. Dealers lined up to take pictures with him. I asked an event staffer where the armadillos were. They’d been canceled at the last minute, she told me: The beer burro was the live-animal entertainment replacement. Cheers burst in from the main hall; Paisley hit the stage. I retreated to a side room, where a man named Andrew—bald, besotted—told me it was his seventh NADA convention. So far this one was tame compared with last year’s in Las Vegas, he said, chewing on a pork slider from a nearby buffet table and swallowing the finer syllables of his words. “You know why they couldn’t have it in Vegas this year?” he asked. “Too many divorces.” Behind him, two men in vests went up and down on a seesaw in the shape of a mustache, each sitting atop one curl of the handlebar. Advertisement I asked Andrew what he thought of these halcyon days. “The last two years, cars have basically sold themselves,” he said with a sigh. “There’s a fucking reckoning coming.” In many ways, you can’t understand U.S. conservatism without understanding the car dealer—that middlemensch of American capitalism, selling a product he doesn’t make at a fat-enough markup to become fabulously rich and politically powerful. And dealers who have lodged themselves in the middle of Republican politics find themselves at a crossroads, just like the party they patronize. Underneath the froth, and the humidity, there was anxiety in the air. I journeyed to the NADA convention to hear the dealers’ vision of the future. What I found is a stark prescription for what Republicans want now. When the first car dealership opened in 1898, in Detroit, it was seen as a convenience for cash-strapped manufacturers, who were overwhelmed just by producing the cars. They needed a means to reach customers without having to build their own sales networks. A class of middlemen sprang up. Car dealers quickly became pioneers of influence, concocting new and astonishing breakthroughs in the very American alchemy of converting riches to political sway. As the automobile industry flourished, so did the dealership model—but the American entrance into World War I threatened to interrupt that ascent. So, in 1917, a group of 30 Chicago dealers went before Congress to argue that cars shouldn’t be classified as luxuries by the tax code. The luxury distinction would have allowed car-manufacturing facilities to be converted to use for wartime production. That would have been fine for manufacturers, which would have continued making money manufacturing, but disastrous for car dealers, who couldn’t just sell tanks. <img class="lazyloaded" loading="lazy" src="https://compote.slate.com/images/48f78620-3bf5-476f-95b0-b83f68435116.jpeg?crop&#x3D;4800,3758,x0,y0" alt="Two couples look through the windows of two cars in an old-timey car showroom with high ceilings and chandeliers." width="4800" height="3758" /> The showroom of a National Motor Vehicle Company dealership in the late 1910s. Photo by Underwood Archives/Getty Images Advertisement The dealers won the argument and then some, leaving Washington with a 40 percent cut in the “luxury tax,” which was then being levied on car sales. With that, the National Automobile Dealers Association was born. That first taste of triumph only whetted the appetite. By the 1930s, with another war effort in the works, dealers went state by state. “At that time, there was lots of attention being paid to small business as having inherent virtue and the need to protect mom-and-pop shops,” Daniel Crane, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, told me. “They embraced that story, and were extremely successful at getting legislatures in all 50 states to strictly regulate how cars were sold.” In 17 states, it is outright illegal for car manufacturers to sell cars at all. The “mom-and-pop” facade of the postwar period gave way to multibillion-dollar, intergenerational dealership empires. As of 2021, the top 10 dealership groups in the U.S. had annual revenues around $100 billion, more than any company that actually makes cars.* The NADA became one of the most influential lobbying entities in Washington, with 16,000 dues-paying businesses spanning 32,500 franchises. Soon enough, a stop at the annual NADA convention became routine for presidential hopefuls and even presidents. Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Hillary Clinton all attended ahead of presidential runs; Bill Clinton and both Bushes came after they left the White House. By the time car salesmen had won their reputation as the very least scrupulous of business practitioners, dealers had secured such an astounding array of political protections via their lobbying outfit that no countervailing force—economists, car manufacturers, civil rights groups, environmentalists, or the Koch brothers—has been able to thwart them. A survey done in 2016 by one of their own trade publications found that 87 percent of Americans disliked the experience of buying a car at a dealership. So what? You don’t have to be well liked if you’re powerful. Advertisement Now car dealers are one of the most important secular forces in American conservatism, having taken a huge swath of the political system hostage. They spent a record $7 million on federal lobbying in 2022, far more than the National Rifle Association, and $25 million in 2020 just on federal elections, mostly to Republicans. The NADA PAC kicked in another $5 million. That’s a small percentage of the operation: Dealers mainline money to state- and local-level GOPs as well. They often play an outsize role in communities, buying up local ad space, sponsoring local sports teams, and strengthening a social network that can be very useful to political campaigns. “There’s a dealer in every district, which is why their power is so diffuse. They’re not concentrated in any one place; they’re spread out everywhere, all over the country,” Crane said. Although dealers are maligned as parasites, their relationship to the GOP is pure symbiosis: Republicans need their money and networks, and dealers need politicians to protect them from repealing the laws that keep the money coming in. The first lesson of NADA? Don’t mention Tesla. The dealers need that protection now more than ever. Recent legislation from the Biden administration, namely the Bipartisan Infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act, has directly and indirectly thrown many billions of dollars at incentivizing people to buy electric cars. And the White House is counting on that to propel its climate strategy. The EV revolution could be ushered in, potentially at a handsome premium, by the dealers themselves. This was, in fact, the weekend’s theme: “NADA is all in on EVs,” read the event’s promo material. “Getting all charged up” read the programming packet tucked into my complimentary NADA-branded backpack. One major problem with this plan is a certain company called Tesla. When the electric car manufacturer started up, it refused to use dealers at all, opting instead for a direct-sales model. Buyers could check out the cars in showrooms at malls and then buy online, a heady workaround of those dealer protections. Online sales minimized interactions with oleaginous salesmen and added price transparency, which did away with the haggling. Tesla, meanwhile, ended up making more money by not having to sell its cars to dealers, who would then mark them up. Other EV startups—Lucid, Rivian—went the same way, and soon enough, legacy manufacturers started flirting with direct internet sales too. “We have all this inventory sitting around in dealers,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said in a 2022 investor presentation. “Get rid of all of it … go 100 percent online.” (He later walked back that statement.) Advertisement The dealers, of course, fought back and are fighting still. They’re in court in California, Texas, Colorado, Mississippi, and Florida, among other places, to keep laws on the books that prevent cars from being sold by manufacturers or that prevent manufacturers from servicing their own cars or otherwise encroaching on their business model. After years of litigation, Michigan, the birthplace of the dealership, recently agreed to let Tesla sell and service cars in-state. Half of states have loosened dealer protections more (red states, ostensibly “pro-business,” tend to have the most binding restrictions), but dealers are still making record profits. Even Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, despite launching his presidential bid with Tesla’s Elon Musk, has raised millions from dealers and given no indication he’d veto two restrictive, dealer-sponsored bills passing through the Florida Legislature. (These bills would make it illegal for car manufacturers to set transparent prices and allow buyers to order EVs from legacy manufacturers online.)

Car dealers and electric vehicles: At a blowout party for unsung GOP heavyweights, the men were drunk—and anxious.

As of 2021, the top 10 dealership groups in the U.S. had annual revenues around $100 billion, more than any company that actually makes cars.* The NADA became one of the most influential lobbying entities in Washington, with 16,000 dues-paying businesses spanning 32,500 franchises. Soon enough, a stop at the annual NADA convention became routine for presidential hopefuls and even presidents. Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Hillary Clinton all attended ahead of presidential runs; Bill Clinton and both Bushes came after they left the White House.

Car dealers and electric vehicles: At a blowout party for unsung GOP heavyweights, the men were drunk—and anxious.

hen the first car dealership opened in 1898, in Detroit, it was seen as a convenience for cash-strapped manufacturers, who were overwhelmed just by producing the cars. They needed a means to reach customers without having to build their own sales networks. A class of middlemen sprang up. Car dealers quickly became pioneers of influence, concocting new and astonishing breakthroughs in the very American alchemy of converting riches to political sway. As the automobile industry flourished, so did the dealership model—but the American entrance into World War I threatened to interrupt that ascent. So, in 1917, a group of 30 Chicago dealers went before Congress to argue that cars shouldn’t be classified as luxuries by the tax code. The luxury distinction would have allowed car-manufacturing facilities to be converted to use for wartime production. That would have been fine for manufacturers, which would have continued making money manufacturing, but disastrous for car dealers, who couldn’t just sell tanks.

The medium is the medicine: a novel history

Doctors were early adopters of automobiles, writes Starr. The Journal of the American Medical Association published several auto supplements between 1906 and 1912. Doctors reported that, compared with a horse, house calls using a car took half as much time and were 60% cheaper. (In Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis’ satire of medicine, the eponymous protagonist’s best friend leaves med school in 1908 to sell cars, and a med school professor advises students that patients’ tonsils are essentially a currency for acquiring an automobile.)

American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage – Streetsblog USA

It’s not an exaggeration to say American cities have been built for cars more than people. “After decades of requiring parking for new construction,” Scharnhorst writes, “car storage has become the primary land use in many city areas.” In Des Moines, for example, there are 18 times as many parking spaces per acre as households — 1.6 million parking spaces and about 81,000 homes. In Philadelphia, there are 3.7 times more parking spaces than households. Of the five cities, only New York has more households than parking spaces, and New York still has 1.85 million parking spaces.

New study looks at attitudes of drivers toward cyclists, and it ain't pretty : TreeHugger

Tara's original work reinforces this idea of social domination; you see this in many of the survey results. For instance, the most anti-cyclist, pro-drivist drivers are the least likely to bother even to turn their heads to check for cyclists, which is a good way to prevent right hooks and left turn deaths. They really just don't care. The more they dislike cyclists, the more willing they are to kill them.

Futuristic Simulation Finds Self-Driving “Taxibots” Will Eliminate 90% Of Cars, Open Acres Of… — The Ferenstein Wire — Medium

A fascinating new simulation finds that self-driving cars will terraform cities: 90% of cars will be eliminated, acres of land will open up, and commute times will drop 10%. A team of transportation scientists at the Organization for Cooperation and Development took data on actual trips in Lisbon, Portugal and looked at how a fleet of self-driving, shared “taxibots” would change city landscape [PDF]. These “taxibots”, the researchers imagine, are a marriage of mass carpooling and UPS delivery intelligence: they constantly roam throughout cities and match carpool routes with mathematical elegance. Ultimately, they estimate, 9 out of 10 cars would be completely unnecessary — as would public transit.

New York’s Sidewalks Are So Packed, Pedestrians Are Taking to the Streets - The New York Times

“I don’t mind the walk, it’s just the people,” Ms. Singh, an account coordinator for the Univision television network, said. “Sometimes, they’re rude. They’re on top of you, no personal space. They’re smoking. It’s tough.” Ms. Singh is just one among many pedestrians experiencing a growing phenomenon in New York City: sidewalk gridlock.

Cars in the USA

A 2011 study at the University of California-Berkeley found that the United States has somewhere close to a billion parking spots. Since there are only 253 million passenger cars and light trucks in the country, that means we have roughly four times more parking spaces than vehicles. If you totaled up all the area devoted to parking, it'd be roughly 6,500 square miles, bigger than Connecticut.

boring cars for boring people

according to Kelley Blue Book, silver remains the color of choice for luxury vehicles. A full third of all luxury vehicles are silver; another 30 percent of them are diamond, crystal, snow, powder, cream, or some other version of white.

Jaywalking as a crime

She and her children were struck by an onrushing van, and her 4-year-old son was killed. The driver, it was later discovered, had alcohol and painkillers in his system. He had two previous hit-and-runs on his record and was visually impaired in his left eye. The driver pleaded guilty to fleeing the scene of the accident and served six months in prison. Nelson, soon after the funeral was held for her son, was charged with second-degree vehicular homicide, reckless conduct, and crossing a roadway in an inappropriate manner—in other words, jaywalking. These charges, in collaboration, carried a penalty of up to three years in prison. In the end, Nelson was sentenced to 12 months of probation, for doing nothing more than trying to get her children home.

Cars are gonna be commodities

It may make more sense for the cars themselves to be owned by someone with a big balance sheet - a GE Capital, if you like - that owns hundreds or thousands or cars with an optimised financial structure, rather than individual drivers getting their own leases. That in turn means that the cars get bought the way Hertz buys cars, or - critically - the way corporate PCs get bought. In this world what matters is ROI and a check-list of features, not flair, design, innovation or fit and finish. The US car-rental companies account for around 15% of the US industry's output, and some models are specifically designed with this market in mind. They're not the cool ones. That poses a challenge for Apple, and indeed Tesla. If the users are not the buyers, the retracting door handles or diamond-cut chamfers don't matter.

Car makers buy mapping company from Nokia

BMW AG, Audi AG and Daimler AG will buy Nokia Oyj’s digital-map unit for 2.8 billion euros ($3.1 billion) to gain technology for connected cars that will eventually be the basis for self-driving vehicles. The world’s three largest makers of luxury cars will each acquire an equal share of Nokia’s HERE division, and the transaction is expected to be completed in the first quarter of next year, they said Monday. Nokia said its net proceeds on the sale will total slightly more than 2.5 billion euros. While there has previously been limited cooperation on auto parts, a joint acquisition on this scale involving BMW, Volkswagen AG’s Audi division and Mercedes-Benz owner Daimler is unprecedented. The deal underscores the German competitors’ push for self-driving systems independent of technology giants such as Google Inc

fiat spider

The little four-seat convertible made its debut at the Turin Motor Show in 1966. The man who designed it, Tom Tjaarda, had also designed earlier versions of the Corvette and Ferrari 275 GTS, and this car reflects some of that influence. It had 128 horsepower on a four-cylinder engine, and later versions were used as successful rally race cars.

Apple Car Seen as Serious Competitor by Auto Executives - Bloomberg Business

“The key element is to make sure that when we’re working with them -- and we’re totally open to work with any of them -- it’s a real win-win,” said Didier Leroy, Toyota Motor Corp.’s European chief. “The carmakers don’t want just to become a kind of commodity, where somebody will only deliver an empty box and somebody will put in the box something which will be the real added value.”