The Right to Repair

[Elheru Aran]

I mean, yeah, I agree that the car stuff is probably unintentional to SOME degree. It's obvious that some compromises have to be made in the design and layout of automobiles, particularly with modern compact designs where there simply may not be enough space for everything the car needs to operate in the one area of the vehicle.

On the flipside of that... it's not like the auto makers don't profit from licensing mechanics and dealers. That $20K Civic that depreciates by a third the minute you drive it off the lot and you're paying $300 a month for... it probably comes with free oil changes at a minimum for a few years, and oil changes are silly easy, so it's not like the dealer loses much, if any, money in that arrangement, and by using OEM parts, Honda gets a kickback too. Essentially the whole 'free repairs for x years on a new car at the dealership' bit? Pure money for the manufacturer.

There might not be much malice involved there, but it's not like they're going out of their way to make it easy, either. It's passive resistance at its finest-- make fixing cars a little bit harder, so people will be incentivized to take the easy way out when it needs to be fixed, and either take it to an approved mechanic, or simply replace it.

[TheFeniX]

Yea, there's a definite profit incentive to keep things in house, but you also have to weigh it against PR. (One would hope) a Honda dealership is capable of keeping a Honda in reliable working order. Billy Bob's automotive may not. Or Jim banging away at his own car, fucking it all up, then bitching about how shitty Honda's are because he's a shit mechanic can hurt profitability.

I more than see your point, but I can also understand the reasoning of even shit-head companies like John Deer or Apple. If some kid who replaced a video card once sets up shop as a "PC/Mac Repair guru" and keeps fucking Apple's stuff up, Apple is going to pay the price more than that kid.

And sometimes you can't win for losing here. Microsoft's original release of ISA (their firewall, IDS, etc system) installed by default with zero security enabled. It was rightfully blasted because "that's not how firewalls work." So with ISA 2004 (I think), it installed with everything locked down and you had to open what you wanted (which is really how firewalls and IDSs SHOULD ship). The same people were complaining because now it was too hard to configure.

i mean, fuck, find me a Cisco PIX that would pass traffic by default. No one bitched about THAT. EDIT: My stupid point here is that MS took a lot of shit for ISA because a lot of so-called security experts couldn't configure ISA 2004 because they, literally, could not read an instruction manual (provided by MS) that even came with pictures and instead dump a lot of blame on MS for a.... well, ISA wasn't dogshit. I liked it, but there were better (and much more expensive) options.

My beef with (once again) Apple and John Deer is that their policy seems near completely designed to be pro-them + anti-consumer. I don't find this as much with car manufacturers. It's mostly them trying to protect their PR as much as possible without screwing the consumer too hard. Probably helps the massive amount of consumer protection laws in the automobile industry that, even though they might be able to get away with more, potential public and legislative backlash can scare them off.

[Aether]

Swapping out spark plugs, changing tires, brakes/pads/rotors, changing shocks,hoses, oil, other fluids, and minor electrical work? You can buy Harbor Freight tools and spend an afternoon reading the field service manual.

The fact is that once you go past the stuff you can do with a few wrenches and a tire jack, you're probably screwed unless you have access to a pretty decent range of tools, time, and a fair degree of experience mucking about in car guts. This only gets worse once you get into cars newer than the mid-2000s. Those Chilton manuals get more expensive, too.

Yes, true. Once you reach your personal limit (lack of skill, tools, time) then you have a choice to pay someone else to fix it. Either taking it back to the manufacture or having an independent shop repair it. The 2GR-FE V6 from Toyota is STOOPID hard to replace spark plugs. You need to remove the intake manifold to reach the 3 plugs in the back.

It all comes down to consumer choice, and if the consumer wishes to do it themselves then let the information flow.

Yea, there's a definite profit incentive to keep things in house, but you also have to weigh it against PR. (One would hope) a Honda dealership is capable of keeping a Honda in reliable working order. Billy Bob's automotive may not. Or Jim banging away at his own car, fucking it all up, then bitching about how shitty Honda's are because he's a shit mechanic can hurt profitability.

I more than see your point, but I can also understand the reasoning of even shit-head companies like John Deer or Apple. If some kid who replaced a video card once sets up shop as a "PC/Mac Repair guru" and keeps fucking Apple's stuff up, Apple is going to pay the price more than that kid.

I am sure companies would LOVE to argue this, but I don't see the general population accepting/gullible/naive that any manufacture of a particular good is a shit company because Jimmy John took his Civic to Billy Bob's Import Auto Repair and Billy Bob fucked up a head gasket. I'm pretty sure people will realize that Billy Bob's Import Auto Repair is a shit company, rather than Honda.

Apple et. al, try to argue that the release of information damages their business. They would need to release/provide access (paid or otherwise) to their 1) tools, 2) schematics, 3) diagnostic test methods.

As far as I understand schematics are not copyright protected, and fail to see any reason why diagnostic information is anything sensitive.