I read the title of the article that inspired this one and my first image was that of right-to-repair evangelist Louis Rossman having a stroke. All this time being a champion for right-to-repair, Massachusets of all states decides to give a tentative step forward…and then the Federal government goes “I mean, maybe not do that if you don’t want to.”
Whether there’s any other interest apart from the ones mentioned by the NTHSA remains to be seen, but their concern is quite simple: with vehicles and technology being ever more integrated, the concern is that malicious actors could take control of vehicles and take all control from the driver, deliberately causing them to crash or using them as multi-thousand pound battering rams from the safety of a computer placed outside blast range. As such, open access to repair data and procedures can cause dangerous people to do horrible things to and with cars.
If this is sounding at all a little bit like security through obscurity, that’s because it is.
The LockPickingLawyer’s excellent Keynote at 2021’s SAINTCON is as good a primer as there ever has been on the concept of security through obscurity and what happens when industries get too caught up on their trade secrets. The main difference in potential attack vectors for new vehicles with a right to repair law versus without is a lot of profit to main dealers, a lot of frustrated owners being told “well, it’s us or no car, what are you gonna do?”, and a load of vulnerabilities that won’t get discovered or patched until they actually kill a couple dozen people.
A more tech-integrated, connected vehicle is a key reason to support right-to-repair. Back when cars were mostly mechanical affairs the average consumer could have an inkling about how things on their car worked. They likely didn’t, but they could. And when something broke down they could point at the offending part and fix/replace it. With more and more tech on cars, numerous failures are lost somewhere in the black box of code and PCB’s, which are rather more difficult to diagnose and fix. your multi-thousand dollar repair may just be a $0.05 blown cap, but that’s labor intensive and could break again so let’s just order a whole new board and shred the old one. Lest we dump it in the garbage and someone reverse-engineers it.
This is not the end of right-to-repair, due to the unique way in which the US is managed, right-to-repair advocates and industry advocacy groups are already preparing for years of legal proceedings regarding state’s rights, trying to explain technology for people who are still fascinated about TV’s being so thin these days, and trying to explain that no, it isn’t just their financial interests that are driving whatever position it is that they’re taking. Consumers can just sit back, root for their side, and hope that nobody does anything stupid. A hope that seems ever more ambitious as time goes by.
