this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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Right to Repair

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Whether it be electronics, automobiles or medical equipment, the manufacturers should not be able to horde “oem” parts, render your stuff useless if you repair it with aftermarket parts, or hide schematics of their products.

I Fix It Repair Manifesto

Summary article from I Fix It

Summary video by Marques Brownlee

Great channel covering and advocating right to repair, Lewis Rossman

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'The car companies want to put small guy out of business.'

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[–] [email protected] 125 points 4 months ago (3 children)

What car you clickbait bastard?

[–] [email protected] 113 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

2024 Ram 3500, but it's an industry push from NASTF so probably more will come soon.

[–] [email protected] 71 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Fuck these guys. If we live in a car society we need to be able to repair cars.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago

That's treating people as Humans. But in our capitalist hellscape, we aren't people, we're Consumers. We exist to provide money to companies, and they're ever interested in finding more ways to make us give them money.

It's not enough that you buy a TV, the manufacturer needs to have ads in it. They need the telemetry on what you watch, when you watch it, and for how long so they can make the ads more relevant. We can't have you replacing your phone battery, so we'll make it an internal component so when it goes bad you're more likely to just get a new phone.

But we can't pay people more, because that's an expense.

The line must go up at all costs.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I knew before I even clicked in it would be some shitbox by Chrysler.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I don't understand how people keep buying rams. They're just such pieces of shit.

Edit: make that Dodges.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

The National Automotive Service Task Force (NASTF) is a 501 C6 not-for-profit organization established in 2000 by Automakers and the independent aftermarket to identify and resolve gaps in Service information, Tool Information and Training.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I truly feel this man's righteous anger at my very core.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Chrysler, jeep, dodge, ram, fiat all have a SGW- a secure gateway that doesnt let any un-authorised diagnostic tool to connect to the car and delete faults or do any repairs, you can still see faults but cant do anything more. If you want to do more you have to buy theyr tool for 15000$ and 1000$ a year, or to bypass the SGW and do the repair ilegaly.

Renault, nissan, infiniti all have a SGW that cant be bypassed normaly so you have to pay about 10€ for a 24h connection for one VIN code. There is no free way to connect to these cars.

Mercedes just introduced a new SGW that i dont know anything much but you can pay to bypass it. The price i got was for 800€ for 50 connections.

VW group is working on a new platfrom with Rivian that is sayed to be 100% not bypassible in any means. Onley a dealer would be able to do anything.

BMW is letting connect and do anything but its made harder by locking every part to a VIN so that you cant use used parts. Rumor is that next generation bmw will not be able to use used parts. Some cars dont let you do it now but there are ways to make it work.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Looks like I'm gonna run my Mercedes 300D until it literally collapses into a heap. The engine is supposed to be good for a million miles, after that I guess I can change bearing journals, valves and seats, bore it out and do oversize pistons like they did back in the day.

I'm appreciating more and more owning a car that only has an electrical system for the lights and radio

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[–] [email protected] 73 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Even cars are getting enshitified.

[–] [email protected] 61 points 4 months ago (2 children)

They were one of the first to go.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I've been advocating right to repair and have been trying to raise the alarm bells to stuff like this. Unfortunately people have been blind to it and keep putting up with this crap.

"Oh I have to go to the ram dealership instead of an independent and pay $10,000 more? Sounds good to me!"

"Oh they track everywhere I drive, the speed I'm driving and also sell it to my insurance so they can increase rates, and advertisers to stalk me? If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear!".

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

How do you find energy to keep going? I got too tired and burned out from trying to explain to people why the right to repair is important, but it seems like they already got too used to thinking replacing stuff all the time and tossing them away because of simple things is normal. When I try to talk about it, I am portrayed as the weird one, who thinks we should be using stuff manufactured more than a couple of years ago.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

I've advocate by doing. I work at a computer repair shop with honest rates, and transparent practices. I volunteer at repair cafés sharpening tools for free. This way you demonstrate directly towards them what you're doing and what companies are doing.

I can show customers that apple's ribbon cables are thinner than tissue paper, all of the freaking glue holding it together, the serialized components, the convoluted design, etc.

Whenever I speak about it outside of the repair shop people think I'm some conspiracy nut, but people will listen with the evidence right in front of them.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Tractors first, John Deere enshitified them and car companies took note!

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Obligatory 'Fuck John Deere".

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[–] [email protected] 69 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The companies don’t want you own your car.

[–] [email protected] 62 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Companies don’t want us serfs to own anything.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago

you will live in a box made of ticky tacky, you will drive a subscription tank, you will eat a "hamburger" maed out of 40% sawdust, you will spend 10% of your life mowing your lawn, and you will think you like it

[–] [email protected] 64 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The reason is more likely that they want to avoid people enabling all the software features they disabled because you didn't take the super-premium-customer-comfort pack for 15$/month.

How do you expect car manufacturers to survive you anticapitalist swines! /s

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You can't really do that with diagnostic tools, but you can change the vehicle mileage. I see a lot of cars coming from shady car lots with under 100k miles that look like they have over 300k on them.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Like what? It's all readily available information, you can buy tools to do it off ebay and amazon.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 4 months ago

Some argued that the new requirements were to protect cars from theft.

Car thieves: Oh noeeees… anyway 🤷

[–] [email protected] 43 points 4 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago (2 children)

This guy knows dodge.

For the uninformed: hemi engines have a massive engineering flaw. Never buy a hemi.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

Can you not press both buttons?

[–] [email protected] 35 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

depending on where the owner lives/resides they might be able to take this to court now for vendor lock-in/right to repair violations

[–] [email protected] 35 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The auto industry is full of POS bullies. Everytime one for them goes into another industry they are totally turds and mess everything up then leave cause no one likes them and they pissed off vendors.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I heard that called seagull management. Swoop in, make a lot of noise, shit everywhere, then leave.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Using that at work. Very accurate.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 4 months ago (2 children)

So what I take from this is… don’t buy a new car. Well, since I’ve never owned a car newer than 10 years old, I guess I’m ahead of the game for once. #winning

[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Really only protects you for about ten years. It’s not like they’re suddenly going to become repairable at the 5 or 10 year mark.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (4 children)

thus the actual answer is "move to a place where you don't need a car to live", you don't need to worry about the repairability of public transport vehicles and bikes are trivial to repair.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Uproot your entire life, including job, family, social circle etc so you can be somewhere with better public transport.

Or, piece of shit vehicle manufacturers keep their fucking nose out of how you modify/maintain/service a product that you BOUGHT with your own money.

Trains and buses aren't always the answer.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

The lack of independent repair hurts the used car market before the cars get that old anyway. Lack of repairability reduces the number of cars that make it into the used market in working condition and keeps prices higher.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

My 17 year old truck has all the features I need from a vehicle. If I can just keep it running I have no desire to upgrade it in the foreseeable future. Even if I had infinite money I'd probably just get one with lower mileage and upgrade it with offroad accessories and stuff. I have basically zero interest in new cars.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 months ago

Oh

🚽

That's 21st century ownership rights

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You can just buy aftermarket tools from Eastern Europe that don't have such nonsense.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I used to have a Prius C, got it used.

95% of shops wouldn't touch it for anything non cosmetic. Hybrid, confusing, scary!

Learned how to work on it myself, before it got stolen.

Guess I just got the beta version of not being able to have your car serviced, due to good old fashioned blue collar laziness and incompetence.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

It's not laziness or incompetence. It's risk vs reward. It's not worth spending extra time and money to be able to work on a car you might see once a year. Send it to the dealer and work on one of the other 20 cars waiting in your parking lot. If you owned a Ferrari, would you take it to one of the the shops around town? No, you wouldn't, and they wouldn't touch it either.

Now that hybrids have been out for a minute, more shops will work on them. My shop now does but we didn't until recently, because we see one or two per month now.

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