Why Congress is considering a ‘right to repair' law for car owners | Hacker News Reader

Why Congress is considering a ‘right to repair' law for car owners

nbcdfw.com

89 pointsdanboarder27 comments

'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:

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.

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.

If anyone has a list of car brands that have or have not adopted this design change, please post.

I think no spare tire is a bigger deal. Some cars have a specific space for them, so you can add them, but newer designs (tesla) do not.

Runflats are a sort-of-workaround.

Is it though? Worst case call road side assistance and what an hour or two. Now if you live in the back country, okay, but for the majority of people it’s just an extra 40 pounds to lug around to use once or twice.

A spare can be the difference between arriving somewhere 30 minutes late and waiting two hours to be taken home.

This is the overlooked part, a spare lets you actually continue the journey

Sure, as long as you have a charged, working cell phone and can afford to pay for roadside assistance. If your phone died or your bank account is in the red, you're screwed.

Actual worst case, you're stuck on the side of the road god-knows-where, for god-knows-how-long, hoping that someone will drive by and have the decency to stop and help.

I think I'll buy a car with a spare tire.

I love having a spare tire, but some people are STUPID about them. Especially those dumb donuts. They will drive on them at excessive speeds and for obscene amounts of time. They are kind of a public hazard. Full size spares are cool though.

My 2000 Jeep had this. From my understanding, the fuel pump and filter are designed to last the same, and should be replaced at the same time.

Every car with pump in the tank has filter located in the tank in front of that pump. Extracting pump is always an adventure no matter the age of the car. Here a 20 year old Subaru https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhXSUYicNr4, and here 25 year old Ford https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDIlwbx0B-s

That’s a bold claim. Here’s a fuel filter being replaced in a 240sx, which has an in-tank pump:

https://youtu.be/rWopnBcWs1g

This is secondary one, first is on the pump in the tank.

Here it is in all its $6 glory https://www.tf-works.com/walbro-fuel-pump-replacement-fuel-f...

and here how to get to it https://www.s-chassis.com/forums/how-tos-installations-48/s1...

"Every car with pump in the tank has filter located in the tank in front of that pump"

In cars that use the older convention, this second "fuel filter" (always in the tank) is technically called a "strainer". My experience is the downstream fuel filter which in older cars is outside the tank needs to be replaced much more often than the strainer which is typically replaced as one unit with the fuel pump. I assume this is because the strainer does less rigorous filtering than the downstream filter which historically has been much easier and cheaper to replace.

Since you talk about fuel filters, an interesting fact on 1st gen BMW Minis (2001 to 2006): the very first models, up to 03/2002 had an enclosed fuel filter, which was costly to replace. After that, it was changed to a design with a replaceable fuel filter (so the same $15 or so part cost).

The fuel filter is inside the gas tank, but replacing it only involves removing the rear seat (which is easy) to have access to a cap under which the fuel filter lives.

I'm actually planning to tackle that in a few weeks, it looks like a medium-difficulty DIY, with some pitfalls that could make the car not start afterwards if the seal is bad.

Edit: fortunately the awesome ModMini has a video showing how to do just that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCppUQfNZQQ

On an unrelated note, another design change on more recent vehicles I've seen is to fuse the wheel hub and wheel bearing in a single part. You go from a $50 wheel hub and $20 wheel bearing (approximately) to a $200 assembly. While replacing the hub automatically involves replacing the bearing, the reverse is not true, and bearings are a wear part, which WILL have to be replaced eventually.

When you do this repair just make sure that the float arm can move freely and won’t get stuck on anything (will cause your fuel gauge readout to be inaccurate).

The tricky thing is that there is a thin line between doing something to screw over consumers and doing it to make the product better. For example on earlier iPads and the current non pro/air/mini iPads, the screen glass can be replaced separately from the display, but on newer iPads (other than the entry line) they can’t because the screen looks noticeably better if you don’t do that. Same deal with soldered SSD’s and RAM- arguably it lets you build more compact and lighter computers than you can without soldering those components.it’s possible putting the fuel filter inside the fuel tank reduces cost, increases reliability, or makes the fuel tank take up less space or be lighter in some way.

I think the important thing is that right to repair should make repairs possible even if challenging.

A manufacturer may want to solder on an SSD, but they shouldn’t make it so every part is monitored by the software to be “manufacturer certified” with no secondary market part availability, no way to override the software controls, etc.

I do as much work as possible on my cars, it’s the only reason I would consider a Mercedes really.

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.

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.

There is no reason these devices and the accompanying software need to be so expensive.

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.

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.

They used to suck, requiring extremely expensive subscriptions to do this.

Now, they allow owners to have access to the manuals, but I don't think this lets third parties see them for free.

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.

This is one of the very few times that I read valid critisism on Tesla instead of baseless infotainment parroting.

Thanks a lot for that (non sarcastic).

But they still won’t sell you parts or allow anyone else to make them.

AFAIK Tesla does sell parts to owners, you’ll just have to go in person to a dealership. Anyone with a Tesla able to weigh in?

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.

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.

Makes me wonder if this is an attempt to preempt the new laws in states like MA with a weaker federal law.

I thought that as well, and it's something I worry about.

To preempt the states' right to repair laws.

Standard lobbying strategy.

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: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/6570

Edit - from the article, here is the current bill: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/383...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com