A brief history of the unsurprisingly slow evolution of car purchasing.
Tesla Motors, as personified synecdochally by its brazen CEO Elon Musk, likes to take the path most oppositional to accepted automotive convention. This has resulted in it/him producing one of the greatest and most disruptive cars of the 21st century, the Model S. It also seems to constantly land it/him in an antagonistic relationship with all of the other useless incompetents in the world who are not Tesla/Elon Musk, including The New York Times, Chrysler, and the National Automobile Dealers Association, the last of which he has infuriated with his practice of selling cars directly to consumers, which is in direct opposition to NADA's monopoly on doing so. Also, many state and national laws.
Turns out, many of these "traditions" date back to the very dawn of the automobile, or even before. Auto company-owned banks—which allowed for consumer loans, monthly payment plans, and empowerment of the mythical "manager in the back office"—seem to have originated with GM's General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC) in 1919. This bank allowed the growing conglomerate a competitive advantage over Henry Ford, who believed credit, along with just about everything else (Unions, dancing, Jews), to be immoral. (Until the late 1920s, at least, when he changed his tune.)
Likewise, with the first used car lot, Empire State Motor Wagon Company, which opened in Catskill, New York in 1898. Having spent some time in China recently—where the annual new vehicle market has gone from zero to twenty-million in just a few decades, but there's still no real trade in pre-owned cars—uncovering this fact caused us to wonder, Jut how many used cars were available three years after the automobile's debut? We can almost picture the serif-laden ad copy in the local newspaper. "Come on down to Empire State Motor Wagon Company in clear-aired Catskill, New York. Not only do we have a fine selection of used cars, we have all of the used cars in the United States!!!"
And though we don't really remember it existing until the early 80s, when one of our yuppie cousins used it to acquire a BMW 318i sedan, leasing predates the car entirely, having gained a foothold in the United States way back in the 1700's in order to widen usage and spur (ugh!) sales of horse-drawn wagons. One can only assume that lessees could choose from a range of cost-effective plans: ten, or fifteen miles per-month?
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