The company which makes those big red bows for when new cars are handed over to customers may soon need to find a new line of business.
Such is the rate that which Tesla electric vehicles are racing out the door of the delivery centres around the country, billionaire EV carmaker Elon Musk has set the doom clock loudly ticking on the days of the ceremonial new car handover.
Purchase a Model 3, the country's most popular electric car, and it's all an online experience right up to delivery.
It starts from the moment the funds are transferred for the deposit, to the lump sum requested when your vehicle (finally) arrives, to the pressing of the acceptance button on your smartphone on delivery inside the concrete hangar-cum-delivery centre in Canberra.
Traditional bricks-and-mortar dealerships are in slow inexorable decline, and the EV digital car purchase experience - together with the rapid growth in EV sales numbers - has hastened the process demonstrably in the past five years.
Shopfronts are fast becoming the retailing "touchpoints" for the car-buying public of the 2020s. But there are no test drives on offer, so buyers are largely committing to a significant EV purchase on the basis of recommendations.
Yet some car companies, like the fledgling Swedish-Chinese EV maker Polestar, are fully online and yet wholly connected to every customer, to the point where the Canberra customer delivery agent opens a WhatsApp chatroom managing multiple queries every day.
John McGrath, for over two decades one of Canberra's largest multi-franchise car dealers, says that traditional car retailing was driving into the great unknown in the next decade and that the relationship between the manufacturer and the retailer/dealer was poised to change significantly.
John McGrath Auto Group is part of the mass dealer legal challenge against premium car maker Mercedes-Benz, which aims to create a manufacturer-run agency model, which would effectively sideline its dealers by shutting them out of the sales negotiation process and turning them into service and delivery centres.
Mercedes already sells its EV models online. But once its dealers are fully disconnected from the sales process, everything else would shift online.
"This proposed agency model will change everything," he said.
"There are some agency models already in operation but this Mercedes-Benz move against its dealers is the most significant in this country."
Asked whether he would again invest millions of dollars in a new bricks and mortar dealership like the Mercedes dealership in Fyshwick, his flat answer is an unequivocal "no".
Per head of population, Canberra is one of the biggest Tesla markets in the country thanks to ACT government stamp duty concessions, free rego (but for a limited time only) and most recently, the federal government's chip-in with a fringe benefits tax waiver for electric vehicles.
For the very early adopters to the brand, purchasing a Tesla in the ACT was a people-free, nervous and entirely dislocated process.
After paying the balance and a delivery date was provided (online, of course), your new car was unceremoniously slipped off the back of a flatbed truck onto your driveway, complete with road grime and bugs acquired on the journey from Port Kembla, some even with the factory-applied self-adhesive stuck to the trim.
Naturally, consumers accustomed to a little more care and attention when parting with a sum of cash well north of $75,000 found the lack of a handover process (of any kind) somewhat ... jarring.
Things then improved - just a little. Tesla opened its Garema Place shopfront In December 2021, where Canberra customers can now, at least, physically see and touch what they were buying. Early deliveries had been in an underground carpark over the road.
But as ACT sales snowballed with 725 Teslas delivered here last year, so too, has the need to upscale the process, create a decent pre-delivery process, and also cater for returning customers who wanted a seamless old-for-new trade-in.
Canberra Times photographer Keegan Carroll had pined for a Tesla for years, the ever-growing numbers on ACT roads only adding to his frustration levels.
"I remember seeing [US rapper] will.i.am driving a Tesla years ago on You Tube and was really intrigued by the car and started reading up about it, hoping one day I could afford one," he said.
That day finally arrived, plus around a 12-month wait for delivery out of the Shanghai factory.
A date was set for attendance at the Hume delivery centre, then the excitement levels were punctured when a text message informed him he had to wait another week.
At Tesla in Hume, the cars with their hazard lights flashing in sequence were those due for delivery that day. Seven Model 3s were due to roll out the door on the same day as the Carroll family arrived to pick up their dark grey-with-white-leather trim Long Range model. Business out back was brisk.
Gone, it seems - and the remoteness of the digital financial transaction, combined with the "is it ever going to get here?" delivery experience, have accelerated it - are the days when new car customers were showered with a feel-good experience.
Now you get to check your (costly, with even the cheapest, white, basic spec, rear-wheel drive Tesla Model 3 priced at $66,000) car is in the specification you ordered. Your smartphone is your new car key but the back-ups are two small flat black swipe cards wrapped in cheap plastic.
Any questions? Head online and ask. You may - or may not- get the answer you seek. It's all part of the modern car-buying EV journey.
