Pretty much everything you just said could have car replaced by the word phone, and you'd sound just like MS BB or Nokia in 2007. "Clever internals but crappy ux" describes pretty much every car ever. Regarding dealerships, ever heard of Tesla? It's definitely possible to diy, and Tesla has nothing compared to Apple's resources.
Tesla is trying this model, but I don't know whether anyone can makes claims as to its success yet. Right now they're pretty low volume and are losing lots of money. Maybe the no dealer model scales, maybe it doesn't.
Tesla has 325,000+ pre-orders for the model 3 a 35,000$ car.
For comparison Acura only sold 167,843 units in 2014 and they have some models for ~10,000$ less.* And they have an extensive dealer network. Honda their parent brand sells well under 2 million cars a year and is a major automaker.
*List price on a new ILX is 27,990 but this assumes people are paying sticker price.
At Tesla's current projections, it will take close to 3 years to fill those pre-orders. That's been pretty well understood for a while, so perhaps that had something to do with the number of deposits placed.
Besides, those pre-orders are refundable $1K deposits, not someone who has put down $30K right now for delivery 2 years hence.
They'd still be facing the same dealer and local legislative roadblocks that Tesla has been triggering states to create or enforce since they started and they can't just bully through that. It will require lobbying, time and possibly new legislation, none of which is fast.
Having Tesla front-run a lot of this stuff is pretty smart if they are intending to go that route though.
Imagine the Apple talking point. "We want to sell you this car but government protectionist regulation won't allow us". And they do that in every state, starting with the most wealthy, most liberal states and move slowly to the less affluent states. Apple has a lot more die-hard fans than Tesla. Just compare the number of people who have Apple products compared to Teslas. y
