'Right to repair' is important and I hope a good law along these lines gets passed, but other tougher problems to solve are also emerging, for example:<p>My understanding is many late model cars are moving the fuel filter to being part of a larger assembly inside the fuel tank. On an older car, a clogged fuel filter (a common problem)could be replaced cheaply and easily. My car's fuel filter cost less than $15. But once they put it inside the gas tank, the repair is much more costly. The shop needs to pump the gas out of the tank, remove the tank from the car and take the tank apart to replace whatever the replaceable assembly is on that model.<p>It appears that car makers are doing this to increase service revenue and to greatly increase customer cost and inconvenience. The inconvenience is a two hour trip to Jiffy Lube or an even faster self-repair becomes a two or three week wait for a major repair appointment and a bill hundreds of dollars more.
I commonly replace discrete (stand-alone)fuel filters 6 to 8 times over the life of my vehicles.<p>If anyone has a list of car brands that have or have not adopted this design change, please post.
I do as much work as possible on my cars, it’s the only reason I would consider a Mercedes really.<p>It will be interesting to see how this plays out because Mercedes provides access to the same workshop manuals a dealer has via a subscription to anybody on their website. However, the diagnostic tool to communicate with the car and the accompanying software is around $20,000. Well out of reach for home techs, but a necessity for any indy shop. Technically Mercedes is allowing anybody to repair, but without pricing controls they can make it excessively expensive.<p>Luckily for about $300 you can get a working “clone” from alibaba, then pay someone $50 to install a cracked version of the workshop software on a laptop.<p>There is no reason these devices and the accompanying software need to be so expensive.<p>Some interesting pricing models I’ve seen before, are with a BUDS system for Seadoo. For $200 I get a controller and a license that ties the software to my ski. Since a workshop would be repairing many skis, the “unlimited” license is significantly more. I think a similar system could be adopted here for Mercedes at least.<p>Also, incredibly thankful for 3rd party manufacturers of replacement parts. Especially the companies that offer electronic repair services. A simple ABS module can be $900 from the dealer, then needs to be programmed. Meanwhile you could send this to a competent electronics repair shop that could diagnose and repair the device for a fraction of that, and eliminate the need to reprogram the device for your car after.
I found out recently that apparently tesla allows you to log in through your tesla account and read the service manuals for free.<p>They used to suck, requiring extremely expensive subscriptions to do this.<p>Now, they allow owners to have access to the manuals, but I don't think this lets third parties see them for free.<p>also I believe the software to access your car is not free, and they restrict access to your car just like apple restricts access to your own phone.
Congress is shaking the tree to boost campaign contributions before 2024. The FTC effort to ban non-competes was deferred indefinitely after thousands of law firms loosened their purse strings. Politics remains for sale. This right to repair law is just bait.
I live in a state (MA) that recently passed such a law. Based solely on the advertising from both sides, it was obvious that voting for it was the correct thing to do.<p>The best the opposition could do was to create two commercials. One featured an independent mechanic (a body shop, as it turns out) talking about how he doesn't need that info and a commercial featuring a woman about to be assaulted in her garage, presumably because right to repair enabled some nefarious actor to get her garage code.
not certain if this is the federal bill being introduced in Congress that they are referring to, I'm guessing there could be more than one as clarifying rights to things you own is a growing movement:
<a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/6570" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/6570</a><p>Edit - from the article, here is the current bill:
<a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/3830" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/383...</a>