In the Tesla model, you eliminate all those for a "test drive experience genius" or whatever they call it, 3 or 4 to a "test drive experience center", NJ gets the sales tax on the car, and whatever they can squeeze out of the 3 or 4 guys who work at the Tesla dealership and the 2 mechanics who work in back.
If Tesla, an extremely minor player in the industry right now, gets to do this, why doesn't everybody else? Overnight all those endless seas of car dealerships, representing millions upon millions of dollars NJ wants to capture into it's state economy go bankrupt and now nearly all of the money is going to CA, Japan and Detroit with a handful of in-state jobs to man the direct-to-consumer "test drive centers". And now for the out-of-work accountant or phone engineer? He used to have a chance to at least work a commission only car salesman job for a few months till he found better work. Now he has nothing to go to in the interim and overall state unemployment ticks up a half percentage point.
As an engineer I see lots of built-in inefficiency in all this. So I understand the HN outrage. But NJ doesn't want efficiency, they want people in jobs and off welfare. Each person in a job is a chance for the State to capture a few hundred dollars off of each car sold -- not as taxes, but as GDP (which will eventually float the government's coffers as taxes anyways), rather than paying out for social welfare programs. It's in the interest of good governance to have an inefficient system, so that there's lots of places citizens in the state can reach into the car-to-consumer pipeline and extract some money from it. And they can do all this without having to put in place unpopular social welfare programs or increase taxes or some other public works program because they can regulate the private market to force it to be more inefficient than it should be.
From a macro perspective, NJ's behavior here is completely rational. I don't agree with it personally, I think there's better ways to do this. But it's easy to explain without resorting to name calling or disparaging thinking about the competency of NJ's governing officials.
