Repairact.com

Manufacturers want their dealerships to be the ONLY one allowed with access to repair their cars- yet the dealerships no longer have techs that can diagnose. When a car gets beyond 5 years old corrosion and age mandate the ability to track down and troubleshoot. Instead they fire the parts cannon and make the customer pay knowing very well the root cause may not have been identified and fixed.

Try dealing with Tesla.

Friggin nightmare.

They do not have a viable wholesale parts program. It exists. Kinda. Just good enough to meet the letter of the law.

Yep this.

Their hope is that if your service experience is bad enough, you will just say "the heck with it" and trade it in on a new one.

Last year I dealt with a dealership--the young tech was in over his head. They wanted to throw $3500 worth of parts at it. About an hour on Google and Youtube and I fixed it myself with a $30 sensor and about 2 hours of my time.

All too true.

Techs are getting worse and worse. And that's at over $100 an hour. Then the O.E.s don't want us to have access to parts and info to do it ourselves. Just a bad situation all the way around.

Here in this rural area, we fortunately have a very good independent who is the go-to on domestic vehicles over 3 or 4 years old. At that point, there is more aftermarket support and information floating around than with the brand new stuff.

Then there's this:

I had a great local independent guy until he retired - and then I moved.
He was the kind that figured out what & why and never immediately went into throwing money t something.
Need to find a guy like him for some things I'm not able to do at home, like fix my Dually's R12 AC.
Any of the guys in the Boise/Meridian area who know someone, let me know.

Being a part-time employee @ Advance ( commercial delivery ), boy I could tell some stories.

On the other hand, my Dad, a Dodge salesman and service writer, told me back in the 70's that cars would get to the point that you ( the average folks ) couldn't or wouldn't be able to service your own car. That was back in mid-70's. We all know now what it takes to work on a "new" vehicle.

Kind of curious after watching the video what replacing tires has to do with the right to repair and it seems that all of those service shops look strangely like auto dealerships? There is no law that I know of that keeps anyone from working on YOUR OWN vehicle. Buy a Demon or a Redeye and do whatever you like. There are lots of aftermarket code scanners and programmers available and they are not free. As soon as a "Right to Repair" from the gov happens Ch!@ will be jumping for joy. And from the sounds of the voice on the video I don't think that's very American English more like AI.. Watch the "Everything Breaks" commercial and see if you can find a USA license type plate or some of those vans without a right-hand drive. Buy a new ANY vehicle and drive it home and rip it apart, do you really think the sheriff is going to show up and haul you off to "No workie on YOUR car" jail. IMO most of this is to get manufacture's specialized diagnostic information access so Ch!n@ and the Pacific Rim countries can start making product to sell here. What special mechanical tool can't be copied or that are not electronic??? You could just get a job at a car, truck or farm dealership and steal or buy the "special" equipment and sell it to a foreign country or just open up your own service shop if there wasn't patent and laws to protect from that. Oh, I forgot patent laws don't mean a thing to protect your product or technologies anymore in this world especially if you sell around the world like CAT, JD etc. Great angle with the pity the poor independent shops and owners when they can't even have a small shop replace tires or do an oil change or turn a wrench on your vehicle. There's more to this than meets the eye. Throw out US Patents they mean nothing to Ch!n@ and other foreign countries. Pretty clever how they use an American flag looking logo eh?

"And that's at over $100 an hour."

Please tell me you don't think the tech makes $100/hour. I know many techs that make damn good money but they don't make $100/hr. They bust their asses working on crap most guys on here wouldn't or couldn't touch. This new crap is ridiculous to repair and even with access to the information most would be lost without the programming equipment required anytime you touch anything on a late model car.

Touch the sideview mirror...needs calibration. Touch the bumper cover...calibrate. Replace the module...program, then calibrate. Error codes....reprogram the module. Replace rear brake pads....scanner to retract the pistons.Alignment...scanner to zero cal the steering angle sensor. The list goes on and on and on and on. We just spent almost 30k on equipment to calibrate forward facing cameras, radars, blind spot detection etc.

I am not nor have I ever been an SAE certified mechanic. I have always repaired and worked on my own vehicles. I have never taken my vehicles in or paid to be repaired. One, could never afford it. Two, satisfying to fix it myself. It's a shame as high tech as everything is these days, they are more unreliable than ever.

So is it the dealership or the manufacture that makes or gets the money from dealership shop service work.? How much of the dealership service bill goes to the manufacture?

The dealer makes the money on customer pay repairs. The dealer gets paid on warranty repairs from the manufacture. A good tech likely makes $40-$50/hr flat rate.Don't forget....that tech has to maintain all his/her certifications and supply all his own tools(likely $50-$100k)

Then wouldn't it hurt the dealership's mechanic if the manufacture was FORCED to give away proprietary technologies that would at least insure that for a small part of dealer service work might come back to him? That seems to be the only thing the mechanic might be able to address at least during the manufacture's warranty period? From what I know the dealership labor rate for the most part is dictated by local and state laws and the DEALERSHIP due mostly to the costs of that dealer's "costs to do business". The costs at a Chevy dealer versus a Mercedes dealer I'm sure in your area are not the same.

My point is....even if manufactures are forced to make proprietary info available to all of us (which I support) doesn't mean we will be able to completely repair our cars without buying/updating/subscribing to computer hardware and software. Those costs can be very prohibitive especially for those that want to do a one time module diag/repair/replacement. Even if they make software available to you and I....would they have to make it compatible with your PC and mine? What happens when they change it next year(because they will)?

Agree, but what bugs me is this video was made in a foreign country.......................WHY?

I wonder where the money came from to make this video and where that RTR .com site is located. Those bib overalls are surely telling that ain't America, and can anyone identify any of those cars and note the non-North America license plates. The tire rack scene is confusing, are they saying you can't even replace tires (or is that tyres ) without the right to repair? There's a foreign scam here, maybe industrial espionage .

Ok the bib coveralls was the first clue, then the funny foreign cars and license plates, then the aerial shot of the intersection without even one PICKUP truck and only cab over semis. And are they driving on the correct side of the road, I think NOT. The houses and the odd foreign car in the first image are surely not in North America IMO.

I think we're getting too far in the weeds here. Should I have the right to diagnose the on board computers on my car? I think I do. Do I deserve to know how to troubleshoot the functionality of my car's systems (EFI, ABS, A/C, etc). I think I do. Do I need to know how internally they all work? Probably not.

Claiming that information to diagnose equipment is equivalent to proprietary information used to design equipment is a false equivalence, IMHO.

Nice to see some passion about anything around here, and people who care enough to even respond whether we agree or not.

No one is wanting proprietary engineering details. Just basic diagnostic access and replacement parts. There is a happy spot that will not jeopardize the O.E.'s ability to maintain their integrity while allowing owners and independents to service their products. Besides, who here believes that the other competing O.E.s do not reverse engineer anything of consequence anyway? Blue collar guys are the ONLY ones being held at arms length on this.

This is a battle for dollars, pure and simple. The O.E.s have failed miserably to earn our service and parts business. Just look at the width and breadth of the aftermarket parts suppliers. They have beaten the O.E.s at their own game.

So, after failing to EARN our parts and service business, they now seek to FORCE us to use them. And frankly, even if they were successful in FORCING us to use them, they couldn't handle the volume. They are short on EVERYTHING that they would need to accomplish it.

The average age of a car owned by an American is 12 years old. That means MANY cars are much older than that. (Yes many are newer as well- averages) The people who own a 12 year old car and older are probably living paycheck to paycheck and cannot afford the average auto repair which is around $600. The manufacturers are not giving an option- but forcing people to buy a new car. The same people who cannot afford a new car with cash and probably are a high risk to lend money to for a new car. A vicious unnecessary cycle. I really like cars and truck made between 99 and 2010. Modern enough to be comfy efficient and reliable- low tech enough to where I can still do the brakes suspension and maintenance- and low tech enough to where a competent independent shop can perform the complicated diags and repairs.