Florida's top cop uses his power to prop up car dealers

Florida in Five: Five stories to read from the past week in Florida politics.

May 11, 2025

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Welcome to another installment of Florida in Five: Five* stories you need to read from the past week in Florida politics.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier is using his office to do the dirty work of a bunch of car dealers — while taking tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from those very same dealers.

This involves a lawsuit in Miami, in which a group of Volkswagen and Audi dealership owners have sued Scout Motors, a VW-backed startup that is developing a new line of electric SUVs and pickups that the company intends to sell directly to consumers over an app.

Though Scout Motors won’t begin production until 2027, it has begun accepting refundable reservation deposits from potential buyers. And that’s a major threat to the car dealers.

Car dealers are protected by 1950s-era state laws that prevent people from buying new cars directly from manufacturers. Those laws force consumers to instead buy most new cars through middlemen dealers who control territorial monopolies.

This is, of course, a terrible system for consumers — one that forces all of us to pay far higher prices for cars. But car dealers lobby hard to keep those antiquated laws in place and shut down any potential competition.

And that's exactly what the car dealers are trying to do now to Scout Motors.

Their lawsuit, filed in February, claims the company is breaking Florida law by selling directly to customers. They want a judge to forbid Scout from accepting any more reservations.

More than two dozen VW and Audi dealers have joined the suit. But the lead plaintiff is Braman Automotive, which does business as Audi West Palm Beach and is one of a number of dealerships led by Miami billionaire and Florida Republican megadonor Norman Braman.

Scout is trying to have the case dismissed — because the company says that its refundable reservation deposits are not “sales” under Florida law. That would mean the company hasn’t actually broken any Florida laws, and the dealers have no grounds to have Scout shut down.

So to save their case, the dealers have asked the court to let them engage in early “discovery” and force Scout Motors to turn over internal records that might show whether Scout’s reservations amount to the same thing as sales.

Scout Motors, as you might expect, has asked the court to deny the dealers' request and prevent what the company says would be an illegal fishing expedition for intel about its business practices.

“Having sued Scout Motors for allegedly selling vehicles in Florida, plaintiffs cannot now claim that they cannot respond to Scout Motors’ motion to dismiss without discovery into whether Scout Motors is selling vehicles in Florida,” attorneys for Scout Motors wrote in an April court filing.

An excerpt from a Scout Motors legal brief.

This is where James Uthmeier comes in.

The Ron DeSantis-appointed attorney general recently had his office send a threatening letter to Scout Motors claiming it “has concerns” about the company's business practices — and asking Scout to turn over internal information.

In other words, James Uthmeier is trying to use the Florida Attorney General’s Office to do the car dealers’ fishing for them.

The dealers, for instance, have told the court that they want Scout to reveal “the number of Florida consumers who paid reservation fees and the total amount collected,” according to court filings. The dealers also say they need more details about the reservation agreements Scout has been signing with potential buyers.

Uthmeier wants the exact same information.

“…This office would like to discuss with Scout Motors the amount of fees it has collected from Floridians, the number of agreements executed, and why it feels that the disclosures (and lack thereof) in the agreement are sufficient under Florida law…” Nicholas Weilhammer, one of Uthmeier’s top deputies, wrote in the Attorney General’s Office’s letter to Scout Motors.

Uthmeier’s office sent the letter on April 18. That was about three weeks after Norman Braman and his wife donated $25,000 to Uthmeier’s personal political committee.

Then, just days after Uthmeier had the letter sent, a political action committee controlled by the car dealers’ main lobbying group — CAR PAC, which is run by the Florida Automobile Dealers Association — gave Uthmeier another $30,000.

And to top it all off: Norman Braman and the other car dealers trying to shut down Scout Motors just filed the letter from Uthmeier's office as an exhibit in their lawsuit.

Listen, it’s one thing to funnel $10 million of Medicaid settlement money into personal political ads.

But using your power to prop up car dealers?

It’s also worth nothing that James Uthmeier is jumping in to help the industry after the car dealers tried — and failed — to use the Florida Legislature to sabotage Scout Motors.

Specifically, lobbyists for car dealers tried to expand the legal definition of "sales" to include reservations like the ones Scout is taking. The provision appeared in the initial version of Senate Bill 1820, which was known in Tallahassee as "the dealers' bill."

Fortunately, that provision was removed from the bill before Florida lawmakers passed it as House Bill 429. It was one of the little victories for consumers during this year's (still-not-quite-finished) legislative session.

*To paraphrase Barbossa, five is more what you’d call a guideline than an actual rule.