I'm imagine Tesla is looking at some sort of dealership model as a growth strategy. I'm sure it would be fixed price. It is enormously difficult to manage and motivate a worldwide sales and support effort. Having the right local ownership is why franchising works.
It is a question of Tesla aligning their goals with the goals of a local owner. Especially in compensation.
Though this isn't the Investing forum, I have an investing take on this issue. I believe that the core of Tesla's present competitive advantage in the marketplace is that Tesla's buyers are also the people that consume their product. Tesla sells directly to consumers who use their cars. Tesla's incentives are fully aligned with consumer's incentives.
It sounds trivial, but this isn't true for the rest of the industry. GM's customers are car dealers - GM's consumers are the car dealers customers. And that leads to misaligned incentives - GM (and of course, equally true for the other makers) is incented to make their customers happy - the car dealers. As long as the car dealer and end consumer interests are in alignment, then there are no issues with this model, and I'm willing to believe that 50-100 years ago when the car industry was getting started, this was true. Today I am persuaded, those interests are not in alignment, and that puts the other car makers into a trap - build vehicles that consumers want, and your customers drag their feet, buy different products, and otherwise sell vehicles they want to sell, rather than consumers want to buy.
So I grant that it's theoretically possible for Tesla to build a car dealership model as a growth strategy that doesn't also suffer from the limitations of the current state of affairs, I believe that the combination of current accepted behavior plus dealership laws leads to a Tesla dealership strategy suffering from the same problems. More broadly, I believe a Tesla dealership system marks the end of Tesla as auto industry innovator and disrupter, and indicates that Tesla has joined business-as-usual. For my own investment in the company, it definitely marks a decision point whether to remain invested or not, with a bias towards selling.
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When I was purchasing a vehicle that had very specific towing requirements (I had to be able to pull at a rating of 10,000lbs), the first dealer I went to lied about the specs of the on-lot truck. I was skeptical, so I crawled under the vehicle to check, and it was the wrong axle and tow hitch. I went to a second dealer and they lied about the towing capacity of the engine. A third dealer lied about yet another spec... all of this was to get me to buy a vehicle from the lot rather than use an online builder that would guarantee me a 3.92 axle, a class C hitch, and a 10k tow rating.
I would have gone straight to the online builder but, in a bizarre set of coincidences, the online build-your-own tool refused to allow me certain combinations of options. Ended up driving 150 miles to get one out of a wholesaler's lot with 500 miles on it. Hilariously enough, a car dealer had sold them the truck to get it off their lot.
Car dealerships are legalized con artists and I look forward to never having to deal with one ever again.
This is an excellent example of misaligned incentives between dealers and consumers, and the problem this creates for the manufacturers. You don't mention it, but the manufacturer of your vehicle (or the manufacturers you considered), picked up a little bit of tar on their reputation as a result of your experience with "their" dealers. If you were buying directly from the manufacturer with the very specific requirements you had, there would have been none of that nonsense. They would have built or found a vehicle that exactly matched your specifications and provided it.
And you were buying a vehicle that dealers in general want to sell.
