Welcome to the Daily 5 report for Tuesday, Aug. 12.
We've had a busy couple days documenting the ongoing fights between dealerships and factories. For dealers, there was one big win and one big loss.
In the first case, which Eric Freedman reported Aug. 11, the Texas Court of Appeals upheld a state dealer board's finding that Subaru of America lacks good cause to terminate an Edinburg franchisee. Bert Ogden Subaru filed a protest with the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles Board after receiving a termination notice in 2020. Bert Ogden Auto Group also operates Mazda and Buick-GMC dealerships in Edinburg.
Subaru contended the store failed to achieve its minimum sales responsibility. The dealership acknowledged not achieving minimum sales but challenged that metric's appropriateness, our story said.
Bert Ogden CEO Natasha del Barrio said the case began "as a fight for fairness at our store, where we simply wanted the inventory necessary to meet the manufacturer's own business objectives ... But over time, we realized this was much bigger — it became a fight on behalf of all Texas dealers."
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Meanwhile, a dealership in North Branch, Minn., lost its challenge to Ford Motor Co.'s designation of a new point, Freedman reported today.
The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Anderson & Koch Ford's dealer agreement "expressly permits assigning multiple dealerships to assigned dealer locality," and the store's locality — or area of sales effectiveness Ford uses to evaluate the store's performance — would not change by adding the point, Freedman wrote.
These types of disputes occur often in the world of franchised auto dealerships with no end in sight. Automakers keep looking for ways to change or reform the franchise system, but they face passionate "holy war" opposition at the state and federal levels.
Remember earlier this year when the Trump administration tried to block federal funding for EV chargers? Never mind. A U.S. court order lifted the attempted freeze on the funds, so now the U.S. Department of Transportation has issued new rules to access the $5 billion.
The updated policy eliminates earlier requirements, such as ensuring disadvantaged communities have access to EV chargers and promoting the use of union labor in installation, Bloomberg reported.
That's it for now. If you want to see this story in your browser, click here.
— Philip Nussel, online editor
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