Even as Tesla Motors plans on expanding its manufacturing efforts and selling more cars, the company's direct-to-consumer business model continues to draw fire from entrenched car dealership business interests. State legislatures are still throwing up roadblocks intended to make it harder for Tesla to sell cars to customers unless the company adopts the local franchise dealership model—something Tesla founder Elon Musk has said he will never do.

The latest salvo in the fight comes from the federal government, though: the Federal Trade Commission has published a heavily critical analysis of the state-by-state legislation that protects car dealerships from competition.

Automobile manufacturers are generally prohibited from selling directly to consumers in most states, with the actual details of the prohibition varying by state (some states, like Texas, have extremely tough and detailed restrictions on auto manufacturers; others, like California, have looser rules). The post on the FTC's official blog levels a number of criticisms at the patchwork of laws that force carmakers to sell through dealerships instead of marketing directly to customers, including this particularly damning paragraph:

Instead of “protecting,” these state laws became “protectionist,” perpetuating one way of selling cars—the independent car dealer. Such blanket bans are an anomaly in the broader economy, where most manufacturers compete to respond to consumer needs by choosing from among direct sales to consumers, reliance on independent dealers, or some combination of the two.

Pro-dealership lobbying organizations like the National Automobile Dealers Association typically respond to criticisms by saying that the current legislative landscape is necessary in order to help small businesses prosper without being crushed by large corporate interests (i.e., the auto manufacturers), who might use their large resources to undercut dealerships' pricing and drive them out of business. The FTC's blog post cuts this objection off at the knees:

Dealers contend that it is important for regulators to prevent abuses of local dealers. This rationale appears unsupported, however, with respect to blanket prohibitions of direct sales by manufacturers. And, in any event, it has no relevance to companies like Tesla. It has never had any independent dealers and reportedly does not want them.

The blog post closes with a call to action for state legislatures to embrace more consumer-friendly legislative options that give customers the ability to buy what they want, when they want: "Regulators should differentiate between regulations that truly protect consumers and those that protect the regulated."

Customers themselves seem to be willing to do whatever they need to do in order to buy Tesla vehicles. A White House petition from last June asking for the elimination of dealership franchise requirements got more than 130,000 signatures, though it remains unanswered. Tesla Motors continues to sell cars even to people living in states where sales are prohibited, too. In Texas, for example, buying a Tesla Model S isn't difficult at all, in spite of the legislative prohibition—it simply requires a few additional steps that mostly boil down to extra paperwork.