The EV Reformation At The Dealership Door

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Seen through an Easter lens, the car dealership model looks a bit like the medieval Catholic church. It sat between ordinary people and the sacred object, translated doctrine, administered rituals, collected its dues, and reminded everyone that salvation could not be obtained directly. In the internal combustion car era, that arrangement made a lot of sense. Cars were mechanically fussy, maintenance-heavy, locally serviced, financing-opaque, and sold through a thick liturgy of trade-ins, add-ons, back-office negotiations, and service intervals. The priesthood existed for a reason.

Then along came the EV, which in this analogy is not Christ, but a different approach to the worship of mobility with its own scripture. It is a product that is easier to explain once the customer has access to the text directly. It has fewer moving parts, less routine maintenance, more software, more transparency, and a buyer base that often arrives at the showroom already half-converted by YouTube, forums, spreadsheets, and Reddit catechisms about charging curves and battery degradation. The old clerical claim, that only the ordained intermediary can properly interpret the mystery, starts to weaken. Indeed, the historically ordained intermediaries struggle mightily with the catechisms of EVs.

That is where Tesla played Martin Luther, key figure in the Protestant Reformation of 1517 to 1648. It did not merely make electric cars. It nailed its theses to the dealership door. The price is the price. The store is a gallery, not a haggling chamber. The scripture is online, in the vernacular, available on your phone at 2 a.m. There is no incense of undercoating packages, no confessional with the finance manager, no whispered revelation that the monthly payment can be made to work if you just sign here. In institutional terms, Tesla’s great act was not technological but ecclesiastical. It declared that the faithful could have a direct relationship with the manufacturer.

Rivian then arrived less like Luther with a hammer and more like a slightly upscale Protestant sect with good branding and better hiking boots. It took the same core doctrinal position, that the intermediary is not always necessary, but wrapped it in a warmer, more pastoral aesthetic. Rivian’s pitch is not merely that direct sales are efficient. It is that they are more authentic. You do not need a local bishop of finance and insurance to interpret your electric truck for you. You can commune directly with the product and the brand, ideally while thinking about kayaks.

Lucid, by contrast, feels like the high church reformer. It also rejects the old franchise priesthood, but not in favor of populist simplicity. Lucid’s version of disintermediation is more liturgical, more polished, more cathedral than chapel. It says the buyer of a luxury EV should not be shuffled through the sacrament of the traditional dealership. They should ascend directly into a carefully managed experience of light, silence, and horsepower. Same Reformation, different vestments.

The dealership resistance makes more sense in this frame too. It is not just greed, although there is some of that, same as there was in the sale of indulgences. It is institutional self-preservation in the face of doctrinal collapse. Dealerships do not mostly live on service revenue, but service and parts are disproportionately important to profits. EVs threaten that profit pool. Salespeople do not necessarily spend more literal minutes closing an EV sale in every case, but EVs often demand more explanation, more reassurance, and more expertise per prospect. Inventory risk has also been real in important periods. So the old church is not hallucinating its peril. The threat is genuine.

And yet, as with the Reformation, it would be a mistake to imagine the old order was purely corrupt and the new order purely emancipatory. Medieval clergy did preserve literacy, records, continuity, and local support structures. Dealerships have done versions of the same thing. They have provided local inventory, service bays, trade-in markets, financing access, warranty work, and a human being in town who can be yelled at when something goes wrong. The direct-sales reformers are right about disintermediation, but they also sometimes act as though every intermediary was useless, which is historically and commercially silly.

There is also a delicious irony here. Luther weakened Rome, but Protestantism did not abolish hierarchy. It created new hierarchies. Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid are not introducing the priesthood of all believers. They are introducing the priesthood of all browsers. The old dealer bishop is replaced by the app, the configurator, the remote support chat, the service center three cities away, and the software release note delivered from corporate headquarters. Doctrine becomes clearer in some ways and more centralized in others. You are liberated from haggling, but more tightly bound to the manufacturer’s one true interface.

That is why the recent Washington State decision is so symbolically interesting. It is not full secularization. It is more like a ruler deciding that a few reform sects may legally exist alongside the established church. Tesla had long enjoyed a special dispensation. Now Rivian and Lucid get tolerated too. That is not the abolition of the dealership order. It is the Edict of Toleration stage. The old faith remains powerful. The new denominations have simply gained legal standing.

The Easter part of the metaphor is even better. What is being rolled away is not the stone in front of the tomb of the internal combustion engine. That stone is taking longer to move. What is being rolled away is the stone in front of the transaction itself. The claim that the buyer must always pass through a ritual intermediary to receive the product is what is undergoing resurrection theology. The direct-sales firms are proclaiming that the old mediation has died, and that a new covenant between maker and buyer is possible.

But Easter stories are never just about triumph. They are about uncertainty after rupture. The old world has been cracked open, but the new one is not fully settled. Some dealerships will adapt and become more like service monasteries, delivery agents, used-vehicle traders, charging educators, or hybrid-era generalists. Some will continue treating EVs like heresy and watch the parish shrink. Some direct-sales brands will discover that abolishing intermediaries also means inheriting all the burdens those intermediaries once carried.

So my playful but serious verdict is this: Tesla was the Lutheran shock to the franchise church, Rivian the handsome outdoor reformed movement, and Lucid the luxury liturgical schism. Dealerships were never just parasites, but EVs expose that the old sacramental system was built around an ICE theology of maintenance, opacity, and localized persuasion. The Reformation analogy works because the fight is really about authority. Who interprets the machine? Who owns the customer relationship? Who takes the tithe after the sale? And, most importantly, who gets to tell the buyer what the text really means?

With that, I provide a tongue-in-cheek offering of “The 12 EV Theses,” nailed to the dealership door at Wittenberg Motors:

1. When the maker and the buyer meet plainly, the whole transaction should tend toward honesty rather than ritual.
2. No dealer can remit the buyer’s uncertainty except by truthful instruction; fear itself is not a sacrament.
3. Those who preach that no EV can be trusted without their mediation preach beyond their commission.
4. Customers are to be taught that electrons do not require the old rites of oil, spark, and exhaust.
5. Customers are to be taught that a transparent price is a better thing than a mysterious monthly payment.
6. Customers are to be taught that a needed charger is a better purchase than an unnecessary add-on.
7. Customers are to be taught that if they must borrow heavily to endure the sale, the sale has not yet been made righteous.
8. When extra fees clink in the backend ledger, greed may increase; the true benefit to the buyer is less certain.
9. Those who magnify their own packages, plans, and protections as though they were salvation itself are in grievous error.
10. Why should the poor believer fund the whole magnificence of compulsory intermediation, if the maker can speak and sell directly?
11. Those who answer the laity’s sharp questions with pressure rather than reason expose the institution to ridicule.
12. The true treasure of EV commerce is not the indulgence chest of add-ons and rituals, but a clear relation between the product, its maker, and the person buying it.

And if any reader feels the need to denounce this little exercise as theologically irreverent, historically imprecise, or unfair to the honest souls in showroom finance offices everywhere, that is perhaps a sign that too many things are being taken too seriously at once. The point is not that Tesla is Luther, Rivian is Melanchthon, or Lucid has discovered sola battery. The point is that institutions built on mediation, ritual, and a dependable stream of fees rarely surrender their role gracefully when a simpler, more direct relationship becomes possible. Easter seemed an appropriate season to have a bit of fun with that. Anyone scandalized by the comparison may wish to step away from the indulgence table, take a breath, and remember that satire, like reform, works best when it lands close enough to truth to make the powerful slightly uncomfortable.