Paying twice the taxes on a new car is not a cheap thing.
The states cannot prevent you from importing a car, but they can make it a huge pain in the butt. Multiple days of having to take off work, getting the run around and misinformation from bureaucrats, spending hundreds of dollars on fees and inspections to get to what is free if bought in-state. They can be very nasty about it.
(don't ask me how I know. This is based on personal experience)
How unpleasant it gets depends heavily on the state and how much of a vendetta key politicians will be willing to go on when they have a corporation thumbing their nose at their laws.
It's not just registration. Most people buy new cars on credit. Which means they don't have the title. You'll have to provide a out of state title, which you don't actually own, to the state. You'll need insurance that is accepted by the state and your creditor. You'll have to make sure that the insurance agency can communicate this correctly to the state and provide them the right information, or it may be multiple trips to government buildings until it gets sorted out.
And it's not like the state you are buying from is going to be all that happy about losing out of probably will amount to several hundred dollars in sales taxes.
Each of these things is just another thing to go wrong. Another day waiting in lines and getting bad information from people who would rather spit in your face then talk to you.
All of this stuff is very doable, of course. Probably take just a week or two of screwing around at the most, etc. And I am sure that Telsa would help streamline the process as much as possible, but they would still lose customers because of it. Getting dragged through the mud for what really is just a luxury car is nobody's idea of a good time.
So my personal experience - easy, no problem. Only paid taxes to AZ, not UT. No lines, no DMV, no problem with registration, nothing. I just flew in, got the truck, drove home.
Was wondering if Tesla perhaps can have a friendly state help out. Say Nevada for example exempts cars from a sales tax if it leaves the state within a week (they get revenue from say the plan being there so they "sponsor that industry...).
Perhaps some insurance company which operates in both states can partner with Tesla (not sure on legalities) of this and also a few online banks which would specialize in financing Teslas.
At least on the surface seems like there are a few opportunities there for other players to jump in and help...
I was thinking more just refusing to sell to any dealership in a state that doesn't allow Tesla to make their own. That way no new sales of Teslas would happen in that state and Tesla could show stats from their stores in neighboring states near the border showing how many people from the Tesla prohibition state are crossing over to buy. Considering this is one of those black and white cases where one side of the legislators(those who oppose direct to consumer sales) are against it for purely corruption reasons, it should take long or be hard to get the public to turn on the idea and demand the law act in the interest of the people as opposed to artificially jacking up prices for kickbacks.
Then again they could just set the price for their cars at one value that they will sell it for in all of their direct to consumer dealers. They should then make ads using this value so that everybody knows damn well that the latest Tesla costs $X. Then they could simply work with the middlemen dealerships but jack up the price they sell to the dealership for so that the dealerships have to charge a very noticeable amount more than $X. Then everybody sees the ads, which btw should mainly be played in states that are fighting Tesla and realize the dealerships are screwing them. Imagine seeing ads that clearly say a big mac is $2 yet when you go it actually cost about $3.50 in your state because your gov't gets kick backs from big beef to have a law that keeps it that high. Again the public will turn since they want the cheap Teslas that come from the official source rather than the expensive ones from some worthless middleman.
Which strategy is better I don't know for sure, but the former is what I hope they do, it seems more respectable and more effective since in the second way the corrupt states still get some revenue from the overpriced sales.
What would the states do then? I am guessing force buyers to pay a steep registration tax, but they'd just have to word in a very strange way. Can't people then just register the car quickly out of state and then re-register it locally so it looks like "a move" legally and not a sale? It seems for any trick these states can come up with, the other, Tesla friendly, states can come with an alternate trick to counter it...