Tell someone their $500 gadget is disposable; most people will be mildly frustrated. Tell someone that their $70,000 vehicle, on which they still have years of payments to make, is disposable or unrepairable by their usual mechanic; most people will feel more than just frustrated.
And wanting repairable products is something most consumers don't even think about at time of purchase. Its something that comes further down the line, when the purchase decision has already been made.
This is the core of the problem. The coalition pushing for these laws doesn’t include most consumers. Absent an expensive ad push, I don’t see that changing.
Takeaway: make hay where the sun shines. Focus on farming states and those with lots of dealerships and repair shops. Maybe put an anti-Musk / anti-Tesla angle on it in blue states.
Credentials. Not spin. The farmers are actually calling for this.
For cars there is an entirely different problem: New cars come with warranties. The sort of people who buy new cars, typically sell them by the time the warranty expires, so they only care about repairability to the extent it affects resale value, which is an attenuated effect. Then someone else is going to be driving that thing until it's 20+ years old, but the manufacturer isn't responsive to their concerns when designing the car because they aren't the manufacturer's customer in the market for new cars.
Wow somehow this simple observation seems to be the greatest critic of capitalism I have heard in long time. It succintly shows why this system if left alone and scaled will destroy everything with its externalities.
And the latter is more susceptible to it. Things work when you're the customer and you have competing suppliers. They don't work when you're not the customer. But you could still be the customer in another market as long as there is one, e.g. because third parties can reverse engineer the OEM parts and go into competition with them. So a major risk here is that the incumbent captures the government to prevent that from happening.
The closest you generally get to competing alternatives with government is "laboratories of democracy" from having different states each with their own laws and the ability for people to vote with their feet, and even that suffers from the same failure mode. The system is intended to sustain that by having a strictly limited central government, but the central government gets captured by those who want to impose uniformity on what was meant to be diversity.
The new module costs 500$
though I'm told tesla is an exception and they are unrepairable - I don't drive one so I wouldn't know.
the above is my personal opinion. My employeer has an opinion on this subject, but I don't speak for them.
right to repair may cover more but it isn't nearly as useful for normal diagnostics.
OBD standards literally only require emissions controls to be openly diagnosed. The rest of the CEL codes can 100% be vendor specific. So when your body control module shits out, and you can't lock and unlock your doors anymore, you're fucked. When your ABS light comes on, and all you need to do is replace a $10 wheel speed sensor, you still need an expensive proprietary code reader to read the codes.
"OBD II is an acronym for On-Board Diagnostic II, the second generation of on-board self-diagnostic equipment requirements for light- and medium-duty California vehicles. On-board diagnostic capabilities are incorporated into the hardware and software of a vehicle's on-board computer to monitor virtually every component that can affect emission performance. "
Yes a lot of the primary engine functions affect emissions, but the majority of diagnostic codes on modern cars are not available to standard OBDII readers. Once you get outside of the engine, forget it. Every module in modern cars now is VIN-locked and can only be swapped in by a dealer, or some kind of cracked 3rd party software if you're lucky.
This shouldn't be obscure. But they keep saying "hey this is our intellectual property"
we didn't use a lot of the data but I had it for weird systems.
Our '08 Caravan had the ABS module die, and try as I might with 3 or 4 independent mechanics, had to go back to Dodge/FCA to get it reprogrammed for the car to accept the new module.
This is the same dealership that, when I asked about "30K mile maintenance" for our '08 Van (with the venerable, proven 3.8 engine) recommended (in addition to oil change, obviously), spark plugs, coolant flush, transmission flush, brake fluid flush, etc. I.e. a $700+ service for a van 2.x years old. And most of those were NOT on the Dodge service requirements.
Why can other cars get away without this specific charging knowledge? Is it because , in true VW fashion, they specced the minimally-acceptable battery size and need to have optimized charging to mitigate the under-sized battery? Just like VW has under-specced wiring for decades.. Seems pretty suspect..