Of course, we'll get a bunch of comments on how this proves that business men are hypocrites because they are against regulation accept where it benefits them and how stupid the libertarians are.
But this is precisely the libertarian argument - if government becomes (overly) involved in business, rent seeking behavior is the natural result. Capitalism is a cruel mistress and businesses routinely fail, so they look for any edge they can get.
In a lightly regulated market with low barriers to entry, they have to compete on service, price, convenience, etc. In a more heavily regulated market, first movers and existing and heavily capitalized businesses look to create new barriers to entry to prevent competition and create artificial scarcity to keep prices high. This can be via licensing (taxis and beauticians), regulations that have high fixed costs but low per unit/worker costs, monopoly/captive markets like dealerships and liquor distribution, and other regulatory structures that that favor fewer, larger firms to more, smaller firms.
Ironically, the dealership structure began as a true capitalist trade-off - dealership networks allowed automobile companies to become large, centralized and efficient by helping to limit their capital costs - as inventory was created, it was immediately purchased and distributed across the country to local sources of capital. Car manufacturers got less money per vehicle but could concentrate their capital on plants, raw goods, workforces, etc. That dealership network absorbed a huge amount of the capital costs of the vehicles themselves. Once a lot of the manufacturers' fixed costs were paid off, the dealers saw the writing on the wall and used their local political connections to modify state laws everywhere to fix the existing model in place.
Playing devil's advocate for one minute, the summary is misleading when it says dealers are "working behind the scenes to change state laws". In fact, they are working in the open to preserve the existing state laws - Tesla was the company attempting to have various laws changed to their benefit (in the Texas case, to their sole benefit as it was very narrowly written). That said, I would prefer a more broadly written version of the "Tesla law" to prevail.