Tesla builds the Cybertruck in Austin, but Texas law prohibits it from selling one there. The state allows new cars to be sold only by franchised dealers, and Tesla does not have any. So a customer in Texas orders a vehicle online from a Tesla outside the state; one buyer said that his documents were FedExed to a store in Nevada and back before the transaction was complete. The car arrives at a Tesla service center in Texas, the customer pays for it online, in the parking lot, and drives off. Legally, he is simply picking up a vehicle he already owns. (Texas still gets sales tax.) In Tesla's showrooms in Texas, employees aren't allowed to tell customers how much the cars cost. The dealers are a cartel, but they have pragmatic reasons for opposing Tesla. Their own data showed that, in 2006 and 2007, the average dealership lost money on new-car sales; the profits came from service and parts. Electric vehicles disrupt that model: there is no oil to be changed, no spark plugs, no filters. The incentive matters: when Consumer Reports sent undercover shoppers to eighty-five dealerships that sold electric vehicles, thirty-five of them tried to steer the shoppers to gas-powered vehicles. In April, 2013, Musk testified to lawmakers in a basement committee room that, without direct sales, "we would fail." Five witnesses testified for the dealers; all were employees of the dealers' trade association. Forty-seven testified for Tesla. The bill never got a floor vote. The association's president offered Musk a compromise: agree to a franchised partner and "you just can't own the showroom." Efforts to pass the bill failed in 2015, 2017, and 2021. Jeff Carlson, chief of staff to the bill's 2021 sponsor, said that the process is "built to kill bills, not to pass them." In 2025, Musk's companies helped get nearly a dozen bills passed in Texas. None was about direct sales. The dealers' political-action committee reported spending four hundred and fifty-one thousand, eight hundred and one dollars through June 30, 2026. The ban was written to prevent manufacturers, such as Ford, from competing with their franchised dealers by selling cars directly to customers. On September 4th, 2026, a federal appeals judge, Patrick Higginbotham, upheld the law, in a suit brought by Lucid, another electric-vehicle company. He wrote that precedent left him no choice. In a second opinion, he called the law "naked protectionism" and ended with a one-line paragraph: "All that remains is a consumer with fewer choices."