Tesla store

After a recent victory in Indiana, Tesla is making a push to allow its direct-sale business model in Connecticut and bypass the third-party car dealer model.

As the company makes its case and backs a new bill introduced by the Transportation Committee this week, the state dealership association launched its own effort to block the bill, which they managed to do 3 years in a row now.
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Indiana is becoming the latest battleground in Tesla’s seemingly endless war against car dealers and automakers over the right to sell its vehicles directly to consumers without having to go through third-party dealers.

The state legislature introduced a new bill that would prohibit Tesla from selling its cars in the state this week and they did it in the most unsubtle way…
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Last week, we reported on Tesla being in a precarious situation in Missouri after the local car dealer association successfully sued the state for having issued a dealer license to the automaker in an attempt to keep their monopoly on car sales. At the time, it wasn’t clear what would happen of Tesla’s two stores in Missouri, but local reports confirmed that Tesla was forced to temporarily close its stores while it waits for the Court of Appeal’s decision.
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Tesla is pushing forward with its goal to open one new retail location every four days until the end of the year with two new locations coming to Colorado next week. The company confirmed today that they will inaugurate two new showrooms in Aspen and Vail.
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Earlier this year, Tesla confirmed that it is trying to open one new retail location every four days until the end of the year in order to grow its retail presence of already more than 260 stores. CEO Elon Musk said that Tesla would focus on the Northeast region of the US, which he referred to as an “underpenetrated” market for the company.

Today, Tesla opened a new flagship location in the final phase of Boston’s Prudential Tower.
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We have recently been reporting on Tesla’s retail expansion, which aims to open one new location every 4 days until the end of the year and to increase its total presence to 450 locations by the time the Model 3 hits the market in 2017.

Now we learn that in addition to the expansion, Tesla is rethinking its retail model and the automaker could soon launch a “drastically” different redesign of its retail concept.
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Just a day before the grand opening in San Francisco of Tesla’s biggest store in North America, the newest Texas service plus (sales and service) location went live on the 8th in Austin last week, which means that now Houston, Dallas and Austin, informally dubbed the ‘Texas Triangle’, have such a facility in the local area.

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Sierra Club, a not-for-profit environmental organisation, conducted a study in 308 dealerships and stores from 13 different automakers across ten states with zero-emission vehicle mandates in order to evaluate the state of the electric vehicle shopping experience.

The study paints a negative (borderline disastrous) picture of the electric vehicle shopping experience, especially outside of California, for almost all automakers except for Tesla, which gives weight to the automaker’s direct sales distribution model through company-owned stores.
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Tesla is on a mission to increase its retail presence this year with one new location every 4 days. The automaker is also focusing on the northeast, a region that CEO Elon Musk described as “under-penetrated” in the past.

Now Electrek has learned of a new flagship store for Tesla in Boston’s new Prudential Tower.
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Tesla opened its new flagship store in San Francisco yesterday. The new location became the automaker’s biggest store and service center in North America, with 65,000 sq-ft of space, ~20,000 sq-ft bigger than the Montreal store, which was previously reported as Tesla’s biggest in North America. The company has bigger locations in other continents, especially in China, and the biggest one is in Norway. 
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If there’s a list Tesla is probably OK with not being at the top of, it’s ‘Best Car Salesmen’. The company boasts about its distribution and servicing model being unlike any other in the industry and the latest mystery shoppers study by Pied Piper, a real consultant and market research firm (not based on the HBO series Silicon Valley), kind of proved that it is the case by placing Tesla dead last.
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Last month, we reported on Tesla introducing the Model X in Mexico and opening the first Supercharger in the country, which it announced in the most subtle, weird, but awesome way. The automaker had already opened a “popup store” in Mexico, but now we learn that Tesla is opening its first non-mobile store in the country.
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Last week, we reported on a pilot project for a new retail approach by Tesla that will see the automaker selling its vehicles inside Nordstrom stores – starting with the one at The Grove, a multiplex retail center in Los Angeles. The store is now open and we take a look at what could be a new way to sell vehicles.
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A new study from Green Street Advisors and first reported by CNBC shows that total tenant sales in 24 malls with a Tesla store are on average $105 higher per square foot than in malls were Tesla has no retail presence. The study concludes that the effect is not only due to Tesla’s own high average of sales per square foot, but that the automaker is also driving overall mall sales.
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During the conference call discussing Tesla’s 2015 fourth quarter financial results earlier this year, CEO Elon Musk called the Northeast region of the US an “under-penetrated” market for the company.

The issue has been partly attributed to a negative perception of electric vehicle performance in winter conditions, something Tesla addressed last winter with a lot of content about the Model S’ winter driving performance, but now Tesla is addressing another reason; its retail presence in the region.

Tesla will be going after summer vacationers with new stores in the Hamptons and Cape Cod.
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The Tesla owners community in Portugal held their first meeting this weekend and published a video to make a plea to Tesla to open a service center and store in the country. The owners gathered in Lisbon, from where Tesla drivers have to travel 750 miles (1,200 km) to service their vehicles to the nearest Tesla Service Center.
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While Tesla has now several stores and service centers along the Bay Area (see below), the electric automaker has yet to open a location in the heart of San Francisco, but that’s about to change. Tesla is about to open a new flagship retail location on Van Ness Ave in San Francisco later this summer.
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“I’ll get there an hour early,” I thought to myself. “Maybe there will be ten or fifteen people in line, but I need some time to get photos before the doors open.” I arrive at 9:06 to a packed parking lot and a long line. I’m #56 in line at Tesla’s Cleveland location, one of three stores in my home state of Ohio, and it’s raining.

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Due to its timezone, EV enthusiasts in Australia are the first to be able to reserve the Tesla Model 3 in-store. Reservations started in the last hour and long lines of people have been spotted in Sydney and Melbourne.
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Andreas Stephens from Sydney, Australia was the first person reported in line to reserve the Tesla Model 3 in store a whole 2 days before the doors open, but now that we are about 24 hours away from Tesla accepting reservations for its $35,000 long-range vehicle, we are starting to get reports of lines and tents at Tesla stores around the world.
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It seems like Tesla’s problems with direct sales laws are endless. After two consecutive small wins in Indiana and Utah, where state committees decided to temporarily table bills that would have prohibited Tesla to sell its cars directly to consumers, now the Virginia Automobile Dealers Association (VADA) filed a lawsuit against Tesla and the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles commissioner, Richard D. Holcomb, to stop the automaker from opening a second store in the state, according to Reuters.
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