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Hey, Massachusetts! You Can (Legally) Fix Your Cars Now
In the latest installment of the Right to Repair saga, on Tuesday a Massachusetts judge dismissed all counts in a lawsuit brought by automakers against the Right to Repair Act.
In November 2020, citizens of the Bay State voted overwhelmingly—by a 3-to-1 margin—to pass the law that would allow do-it-yourselfers and independent mechanics to access vehicle data for the purpose of diagnostics and repairs. In June 2021, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the automakers’ trade group, sued to reverse course on the ballot measure, for reasons including “cyber security concerns, insufficient time to comply with the new data access requirements and their contention that the ballot initiative is preempted by federal law,” according to a statement provided in 2021 by automotive advocacy group the Auto Care Association.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, too, took up the cause of carmakers for a time, citing nefarious hackers who might remotely disable vehicle systems. But in 2023, it reversed course and removed all previous obstructions to the legislation, allowing the Right to Repair Act to move forward uncontested. Still, the automakers’ lawsuit persisted.
Following a period that included seven separate delays in a verdict, the Tuesday dismissal of the carmakers’ federal lawsuit by Judge Denise J. Casper should finally put an end to the legal back-and-forth that has stymied the will of the people for more than four years now.
“Today is a big win for both consumers and local independent repair shops alike,” Tommy Hickey, executive director of the Right to Repair Coalition, said in a statement. He added that the law will make the people, rather than the manufacturers, the “gatekeepers” of their cars’ data and repair information, as it should be. “They will no longer be at the mercy of car manufacturers, who time and time again have chosen profits over consumer choice,” he said.
On the back of this reaffirming news, we look forward to an influx of DIY stories and questions from the Commonwealth. Send your adventures (and misadventures) under the hood and in the garage to editor@hagerty.com. And if you want to read hundreds more articles about the nitty gritty of DIY, click here.
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It certainly took too long to get to this point. I still expect the manufacturers to drag their knuckles on this one as much as they can.
Wonder how this will work with internationally-sold models subject to new EU cybersecurity regulations.
Now the government will attack the MFG’s for providing info that people will use to make their cars out of compliance for emissions.
With these Carb states it is a no win.
None of these people are on the same page. No wonder cars keep getting more expensive.
All this does is require the makers to sell the independent shops super expensive diagnostic equipment to analyze the data. This was tried with John Deere years ago and failed. A manufacturer does not have to disclose proprietary software data, they own it. If they desire they can sell it but won’t. So this can enable the independent shops to buy the equipment at whatever price Ford wants to charge to sell it. Then the independants can also charge a fortune to pay for the diagnostic equipment and training to use it. So Yeah! You now have the “right” of using a shade tree “mechanics” for high tech repairs if you so choose, LOL! So please take your car with umteen computers to the NOTSOQUICK Oil Change place to have your $80,000 SUV’s computer controlled transmission worked on by an oil change guy. Good luck with that.
The equpiment is readily available a decent prices. It’s the software that the OEM’s are trying tokeep proprietal. This unlocks the software and makes it available on the open market.
They have had that equipment for years to alter engine data used for performance and compliance, it’s called mod’s when the changes are sold and mostly illegal as they affect emissions but still widely advertised, sold and installed for over 20 years. Even though the EPA took some of the largest to court with massive fines it continues.
Ford makes mod’s for Ford products that increase power and some are EPA street legal and sold, installed and warranted by Ford like the one on my car. Some from Ford are not EPA street legal and for racing/off road use only. I’m sure others do this also.
That is not the data wanted from the makers but all they will get, the fed courts upheld a companies right NOT to have to disclose their software code to be freely used by other companies I believe in the John Deere right to repair case. Why would GM write code if they can just use Ford codes? The right to repair does not include the right to even know the software codes just certain parameters in the computers and the right to access the diagnostic info, even the feds can’t force the disclosure of the program code. Imagine Google having to give Microsoft their codes for the Chrome browser for free. So it is a win in the sense that all independants can buy the equipment to do these thing but it has been out there for years from 3rd parties at probably 25% of what Ford will charge for one to do just Fords. Most large shops have had this for years to service my cars. Ford is not in the test equipment business and does not want to be. If a shop cannot diagnose a computer issue and change it find another shop. That is all Ford will do or my shop will do, nobody will try to “repair” the computer so there is no need to disclose programs except to allow China or others to make cheap knockoffs and auto parts stores to sell them with Ford programs installed. So it will never happen we hope.
First off, I Am Not A Programmer, but I do wrench on my 25 year old car with a lot of things made of unobtanium. In my experience the computers aren’t given to breakage from a software / firmware standpoint, because that software / firmware is in memory that is metaphorically fenced off so that it’s difficult to overwrite, and which can be overwritten back to stock spec. The physical computer, that is, the box with all the circuit boards, wires, and various electronic bits can break, and there are shops out there to whom you can send your dead whatever module for them to physically fix. A simple example is resoldering broken circuits in an electronic gauge cluster.
As someone who is discovering the added difficulty of simply changing brake pads (due to special scan tools needed for EPB operation and “brake pad change mode”), this is a tiny, nearly negligible, step. Sure, the manufacturer may now be required to lease you their proprietary software (at non-trivial cost), but you still need one of their approved J2534 adapters (whose list consists of models largely no longer made and which cost many thousands when they were available). Or, you can chance compatibility with a $200 Chinese J2534 adapter that may have spyware. Or, you can chance buying a standalone Chinese scan tool (perhaps relabeled with US company’s name) that may or may not work. What does it say about the industry when the only practical purveyors of vehicle repair devices are the Chinese?
Now we need to disallow the selling of data from manufacturers to insurance companies.
If you read the law itself (https://malegislature.gov/Laws/SessionLaws/Acts/2012/Chapter368) it would appear that it basically just requires manufacturers to provide the same diagnostic and repair info that a dealer can get from their scanner. I requires two things in particular: (i) that the manufacturer provide an online or electronic system with the information about the codes and diagnoses/repair info; and (ii) that they provide accessibility to the diagnostic info through a non-proprietary (OBDII) system. So, while I am not a lawyer and don’t even play a good one one tv, this isn’t access to “code” or anything like that. All it seems to be doing is to ensure you can (a) get a code using an OBDII scanner; and (b) go to a manufacturer website to see what that code is and what the repair info is. The law says that the diagnostic and repair info has to be available at market value, non-discriminatory price on an hourly, daily, etc. basis.
So if I am interpreting this correctly, it is for example no different than requiring what BMW already does with with their online diagnosis/repair manual – you can plug any generic scanner into your BMW OBDII port and get a code, then you can purchase access to BMW’s website for a day for like $30 and get full access to what the code is and what the repair procedure is behind it.
I don’t know if manufacturers were starting to block access to that info unless you were a dealer, but if they were then this is a win, so long as manufacturers provide reasonably priced access to the online service info (which IMHO BMW has).
The biggest issue I’ve always had with this is the name. “Right to Repair” is clever marketing to rile up the American citizenry as we like to think of ourselves as self sufficient Yankees. We’ve ALWAYS had the right to repair our stuff and many of us continue to do so. What we don’t all have is knowledge and ability. I can see both sides of the argument but equating ability with a right irks me.