Car Dealers Fire Back: Why Negotiating Is Good For Car Buyers (Video)

The battle between Tesla Motors, which sells its electric cars directly to customers over the Internet, and the nation's car dealers--which want to make that practice illegal--has raged for four years.

Now, it seems to be starting to breed a wider conversation about the role of franchised dealers.

The argument against Tesla's direct-sales model rests on existing laws in many states that require cars to be sold by a third party.

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After nearly five years of quiet lobbying by state dealer bodies, the car dealers' national trade organization joined in this summer with a public campaign describing the consumer benefits of the laws that make Tesla's sales model illegal.

The National Auto Dealers Association (NADA) launched its Get The Facts campaign--complete with a website and video--earlier this year to extol the virtues of franchised dealerships.

Now, the NADA is back with another video, highlighting what it calls "the benefits of price competition."

This latest marketing piece echoes the perky style of the previous video--with brightly-colored cartoon dealerships peddling cute small hatchbacks--but this time the message is all about why negotiating is good for buyers.

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It comes in the wake of a series of videos published by Edmunds that ridiculed this practice--also known by the less-sophisticated term "haggling."

The NADA video claims that manufacturers' suggested retail prices (MSRPs) that really are only suggested allow customers to get a better deal among competing dealerships selling the same car.