The only reason for Tesla to support right to repair is to increase regulatory burden on competitors, stunt innovation and raise costs for their competition. Shame on this anticompetitive behaviour.
Instead the industry is looking at the EV transition as a way to increase costs and decrease customer freedom. This is absolutely artificial and in no way mandated by the technology.
A similar case in computing is what happened with mobile and tablets where a change in form factor allowed lock down to be smuggled in without people asking too many questions. A Mac is now a big overgrown tablet in terms of its CPU and innards but you can install your own OS on a Mac but not an iPad. Why? No technical reason at all.
Right to repair is good but it’s actually less than what we need. We need a huge rebirth of DIY technology and less centralized supplier ecosystems. This may require some regulation but it also requires consumers to stop being so passive and prioritizing shininess and laziness over every single other thing. The “millennial minimalism” era needs to end both as an aesthetic and a framework for consumer-producer relations. (The two are related.)
The EV I want is a simple super reliable easily repairable one.
I personally went for the Nissan Leaf in lieu of this because it’s basically a Nissan Versa with a motor and batteries where the engine and gas tank go. Not good for road trips but a nice city car and decently repairable. (I have an older ICE for road trips that I don’t drive much otherwise.)
But the step down in complexity also makes it easier to become a manufacturer, and as battery costs come down this is likely to happen.
At which point a startup with no other way to distinguish themselves can start selling highly repairable electric cars. Customers figure out that these have a lower ownership cost (whether or not they do the repairs themselves) and start preferring them. The incumbents then follow suit or lose the market.
The main reason this doesn't happen for phones is that the market is so consolidated. The main SoCs are made by only a small handful of companies who don't publish documentation, and producing a competitive one is capital-intensive because of the constraints of the form factor. But even there it may not be permanent -- what's going to happen to phones once there is a fully-documented RISC-V SoC on the market that has tolerable performance and power consumption?
Same logic.
And these functions are in many cases quite simple. You replace the controller for the door locks. It operates a solenoid that locks and unlocks the doors. Maybe they no longer function by calling the call center to have them unlock your car, but maybe you don't want that anyway. They still function if you press a button on your key fob.
No, it takes two.
Seriously, I've read that some EV makers require that two persons be present when working on the HV system, the second one on watch with a pull-up hook in case the first one seizes up touching some 400 or 800 V DC part.