News
Volvo faces legal pushback in California on possible pivot to Tesla-style direct sales model
On Tuesday, the California New Car Dealers Association (CNCDA) filed a petition against Volvo USA with California’s New Motor Vehicle Board claiming the legacy car maker violates state franchise laws banning manufacturer competition with dealerships. The group claimed the “Care by Volvo” (CbV) subscription service launched in early 2018 which provides all-in-one packages of 24-month leases, premium insurance, concierge service, and most vehicle maintenance, was using Volvo dealers as de facto “agents” in an effective practice of dealing directly to consumers. The move is reminiscent of Tesla’s struggles, itself being the subject of dealer franchise-focused legal actions. However, the legal questions aside, the sum of CNCDA’s complaints additionally indicate its objection to Volvo’s possible ongoing shift to a Tesla-style overall direct-sales model.
In Volvo’s CbV subscription plan, buyers select from two currently offered models – the S60 and XC40, including customizations – via an app or a corporate-run website. Once the car selection is final, an agent from Volvo’s financial services company (the “Volvo Concierge”) contacts the buyer and finalizes the package particulars, after which delivery is scheduled at a local participating dealership. During the online process, the customer is given a guaranteed monthly subscription price with the option to upgrade after 12 months and chooses the dealership that will complete the sale. Volvo provides the financing directly through a separate financing branch, and the insurance is provided by Liberty Mutual. The dealer handles the final sales contract, payment, and vehicle hand-off.
While the dealerships participate in the CbV program voluntarily and receive an 8% sales commission, CNCDA claims the process significantly limits the dealer’s ability to build a (profitable) relationship with the customer and eliminates dealer earnings potentials stemming from financing services and other package “add-ons” during the sales process. On its face, this might seem like a reasonable argument, but Volvo’s perspective seems to be addressing customer preferences, a new era of sales strategies, and an effort to reach a new customer market. In an aim to make the brand more appealing to a younger generation accustomed to app-based ride-hailing and a la carte video entertainment services, Volvo may be hoping CbV will help them make inroads towards Millennials in particular.
In an interview with Global Fleet, Alan Visser, CEO of Volvo’s Chinese sister brand, Lynk & Co., detailed how the Millennial connection is explicitly part of that company’s subscription-only business model: “On the other [hand], there is [the] smartphone aspect…Millennials want maximum flexibility and all-inclusive pricing rather than long-term commitments and hassle. Our subscription model is more than just a private lease. It includes services like pick-up and delivery, cleaning, and lots of other things I cannot disclose just yet,” he stated. Also, Lynk & Co intends to only sell hybrids and/or battery electrics, adding yet another Volvo parallel to Tesla. That, and its plan for showcasing its vehicles prior to customer purchase: “In large urban areas we will have so-called offline stores: small, sociable brand boutiques,” Visser additionally explained in the interview.
In their petition, the California dealer’s group made the connection between Lynk & Co and Volvo USA a key part of their case for Volvo’s competition law violation. According to Jalopnik’s review of a pre-production model of Lynk’s first vehicle, the direct-sales subscription is possibly being tested in the US via the Care by Volvo program. “They’re very eager to try out this subscription model of car ownership, or subscribership…They’re sort of testing the waters with the Care by Volvo program, which is proving to be a good plan,” Torchinsky writes, summarizing his talks with the company’s representatives. This article was referenced in CNCDA’s petition against Volvo’s CbV program. Torchinsky goes on to further describe how the dealership experience “sucks” enough for consumers to have opened up a new market for doing car sales business which Lynk has intentionally capitalized on.
Protecting dealers doesn’t appear to be the main priority of CNCDA. In their petition, the New Car Dealers Association seems to be taking the biggest issue with Volvo’s possible negative position on the franchise model entirely, using the legal system as a toolkit to keep customers stuck in an aging infrastructure rather than innovating with the times and finding less restrictive ways to make everyone happy. “‘Subscription programs’ like CbV have been described as a way for the manufacturer to cut out the dealer and ultimately eliminate the franchise model,” the group stated in the introduction of their petition to the New Motor Vehicle Board. Where franchise laws were set up to protect dealers from forced manufacturer bidding, the association seems to be attempting to morph manufacturers wanting to do their own customers’ bidding into an attack on dealer rights. Tesla has certainly encountered this type of morphing even without the challenge of having private dealerships.
In December of last year, a Connecticut state court judge concluded that Tesla’s Greenwich Ave. gallery was operating like a dealership and required a license to do so, something the electric vehicle company is not eligible for because it doesn’t have franchises. The Connecticut Automotive Retailers Trade Association (CARA) was the party responsible for initiating the proceedings which led to the judgment, an organization often at the front lines of defending the state’s franchise laws from would-be offenders. CARA holds the position that vehicle sales should only be conducted through licensed independent dealerships, leaving direct-sales manufacturers like Tesla with limited options for providing its products to customers wanting to buy them.
The car subscription model isn’t unique to Volvo. Luxury car manufacturers especially seem to have also discovered the new market potential of app-driven car flexibility: Access by BMW has price tiers in the $2000-$3700 range for their packages (which include unlimited vehicle swapping), but it’s only available in Nashville, Tennessee for now. The UK-only Carpe by Jaguar Land Rover has $1200-$2900 packages with similar features as CbV, the Mercedez-Benz Collection is similar in price to Carpe, and a few others in that range are being developed and expanded by their respective manufacturers. Several third-party subscription services have also popped up with more flexible lease terms and more economical pricing. Clearly, the trend is showing data points that are worth investment attention.
With all the controversy, it might not even be dealerships that stand to lose the most with subscription models. The case has been made for classifying them as rental cars, which would be another market that might take issue with manufacturers latest ideas for doing business. Some of the services, like Flexdrive, are practically set up to be permanent rental solutions. As with all things, though, only time will tell.
2019-1-15 CNCDA Petition Re… by on Scribd
Lifestyle
Tesla wins over Netflix’s Selling Sunset star, who’s now ditching his Bentley
Selling Sunset’s Jason Oppenheim swapped his Bentley for a Tesla and promised ten for employees.
Jason Oppenheim, the luxury real estate broker best known as the star of Netflix’s Selling Sunset, has parked his Bentley for good and moved into a Tesla Model Y, and he says Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is the reason.
Oppenheim, who founded The Oppenheim Group, the Los Angeles brokerage at the center of the show, posted a video to X on Saturday evening that he called “the most important video I’ve ever posted.” In it, he rides from Newport Beach to his firm’s Los Angeles office, a trip he put at roughly an hour and 15 minutes, while FSD handles the drive and parks the car without him touching the wheel or the accelerator. He said he handed the Bentley to his father because he no longer has any use for it.
Tesla shared the clip from its main account on X about two hours later, pulling out the quote that has since spread well beyond the Tesla community:
“[FSD Supervised] is life-changing. I was on the phone with my brother last night, and I made him buy one. He literally bought one while we were talking. I’m buying 10 of my employees a Tesla with FSD. It’s 8x safer than the average driver. There’s nothing more important than the safety of you and your loved ones.”
Oppenheim was candid about why the safety pitch landed with him. He admitted in the video that he is a distracted driver who answers emails and texts behind the wheel, and framed the employee purchases as a way to keep his team off their phones while driving. Elon Musk posted “Tesla FSD feels like magic” less than half an hour after the video went live.
The endorsement lands at a convenient moment for Tesla. The company delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3, beating Wall Street’s estimates and marking its best quarter ever without the $7,500 federal EV tax credit.
A public service announcement. https://t.co/NYa1IpKwBX
— Jason Oppenheim (@OppenheimJason) October 4, 2026
Tesla FSD has been subscription only in the U.S. since February at $99 per month, and Tesla said in its Q2 update that active subscriptions hit 1.48 million, up 56 percent year over year, with more than 55 percent of new North American deliveries leaving with FSD attached. That attach rate is the figure Ron Baron cited last month when he told CNBC “the time to buy the stock is now.” At current pricing, Oppenheim’s 10 employee cars alone would add $990 a month, or about $11,880 a year, in FSD revenue.
Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy said in July that FSD had logged more than 12 billion miles while going roughly twice as far between collisions as manual driving. FSD also remains a supervised system, so Oppenheim and his employees are still required to watch the road, even as Tesla rolls out v14.3.10 with Automatic Collision Evasion, which can steer or brake on its own to avoid a frontal crash.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk follows Trump’s lead, says a SpaceX name change is coming
Elon Musk says SpaceXAI will become SpaceXSI, marking its second rebrand in under three months.
Elon Musk wants to rename his artificial intelligence company again, less than three months after its last rebrand.
In a string of posts on X early Sunday morning, Musk wrote “No more AI,” followed by “SI” and “It’s better.” He then added, “SpaceX is a super intelligence company.” When a user asked whether SpaceXAI could become SpaceXSI, Musk replied, “Yes, we will make that change.”
The posts extend a terminology push that began at the White House last week. On September 29, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” on government websites, policy documents and press releases. The same day, Musk sat beside Trump as the heads of the largest AI companies signed a voluntary safety accord, as Teslarati reported. Speaking to reporters afterward, Musk caught himself mid sentence: “I think it is worth highlighting the positive benefits of A.I. … S.I., pardon me.”
Elon Musk and Trump are closer than ever, and Tesla could be the big winner
SpaceXSI would be the third name for the business since February. SpaceX acquired xAI on February 2 in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. In May, Musk said xAI would be dissolved as a separate company, and on July 6 the division adopted the SpaceXAI name and a new logo that placed the xAI letters inside the SpaceX identity.
Musk gave no timeline. He did not say whether SpaceXSI would be a legal name change or a branding update, whether the @SpaceXAI handle on X would change, or how the shift would apply to products like Grok. The company had not issued a formal announcement as of Sunday morning.
The change would reach well beyond a chatbot. SpaceXAI now houses Grok, the X platform, the Colossus training clusters in Memphis and the coding tool Cursor, which SpaceX acquired in August. It also runs the orbital compute effort SpaceX is building around Nvidia hardware, which Musk said during the company’s first earnings call would be exclusive to Nvidia.
It’s unclear if rivals like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and Nvidia have plans to also rename their companies or products. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has continued to say “AI” in public, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has gone partway, describing data centers as “super intelligence factories.”
The rename would also line up SpaceX’s AI branding with the federal government’s language as Musk takes on a new advisory role at the Pentagon, where he is helping lead the Project Meridian study on the future of warfare.
Starlink is launching a new beta path for ordinary property owners and local operators to turn a single Starlink kit into a small shared-access business for passive income.
Under the Starlink for Communities program, a host installs one dish and router setup in a location with nearby demand: an apartment complex, campground, rural crossroads, or event site. Neighbors or local users can buy short-term passes rather than full individual subscriptions, giving the Starlink provider a potential path to passive income.
Hour, day, and week passes cover one device. A month pass covers up to four. Starlink handles account creation, payments, access controls, and the satellite link itself. The host’s role is mainly placement, power, and basic upkeep, with earnings tied to each paid connection.
Big news! SpaceX is introducing a new @Starlink for Communities program that lets you earn money by providing Starlink internet to your neighbors or people nearby, who can pay for access by the hour, day, week, or month.
Neighbors pay for the access they need, while the person… pic.twitter.com/DtOUs0Ekvt
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) October 1, 2026
The model echoes the passive-income vision long attached to Tesla’s Robotaxi plans, and it seems like it’s something Musk has hinted toward in the past as he believes AI will make the need to work relatively optional. In both cases, the platform owns the hard parts of matching, billing, and network management, while an individual supplies a physical asset that sits idle much of the time.
A Starlink host’s dish can serve multiple nearby users without each household buying and installing its own terminal. A Tesla owner, under the stated Robotaxi concept, would leave a vehicle enrolled in the fleet during unused hours so the car generates rides while the owner is at work or asleep.
Both arrangements convert under-utilized hardware into a revenue stream. They also let the company scale coverage or capacity without owning every endpoint.
Differences are practical. A Starlink kit is a fixed, relatively low-cost terminal whose main constraint is local congestion and line-of-sight. A Tesla Robotaxi is a mobile, high-value vehicle whose earnings depend on demand density, utilization rates, insurance, cleaning, and charging.
Starlink’s program is already accepting host applications in multiple countries and describes the revenue split as ongoing. Tesla’s owner-network version remains more aspirational.
The company currently operates a limited company-controlled robotaxi service in select areas and has solicited interest from fleet buyers for Cybercab vehicles, while private Full Self-Driving owners have not yet been able to dispatch their own cars for paid rides at scale.
Tesla primes Cybercabs for 4K streaming and high bandwidth gaming with Starlink integration
Starlink is a satellite broadband service operated by SpaceX that uses a constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites to deliver internet to locations where terrestrial broadband is slow, expensive, or absent. It has grown to millions of subscribers worldwide by selling direct residential, mobile, and enterprise terminals, and have become widely available at a wide array at retail locations like Target and Best Buy.
The Communities program extends that reach by letting hosts resell short bursts of capacity to people nearby, while also providing high-speed internet access to those who are simply around a Starlink user.
Tesla wins over Netflix’s Selling Sunset star, who’s now ditching his Bentley
Elon Musk follows Trump’s lead, says a SpaceX name change is coming
