Have you heard about the Right to Repair fight?
Here’s the issue. You own your car, whether it’s paid off or you’re still making payments. But there are repairs your own mechanic isn’t allowed to finish, and that can cost you a lot more money.
When your check engine light comes on, you can pull up to AutoZone and they’ll read the code your vehicle is putting out and tell you what’s wrong, for free. That’s been standardized since 1996 and it’s open to anyone. Great.
The wall is one layer deeper: the software, security credentials, and detailed vehicle data needed to finish some repairs. Replace a module on a newer vehicle and it has to be programmed, calibrated, or “coded” before the car will accept it. Independent shops say access to those tools is often restricted, expensive, or incomplete – which forces you back to the dealer for a repair the local shop could otherwise handle.
So an independent mechanic can read the same code you did and still not finish the job – not for lack of skill, but because he’s shut out of the last step. That sends you to the dealer, who isn’t necessarily better, just the only one with the key.
It costs you because the dealer has little competition on those repairs. Consumer Reports surveys drivers every year: independents rate highest on price, dealers lowest, nearly all of them scoring the worst possible mark. So you pay more on a $700 job you had no way to shop around. And when local shops lose enough of this work to close, the nearest dealer can be 40 minutes away. In a rural county that’s half a day gone to fix a car the shop down the road used to handle.
Look, we all know vehicles are more complicated now. It’s funny to me that I drive a 2020 Toyota Tundra with a V8 – I pull a travel trailer with it – and every truck expert I’ve ever talked to has told me to never get rid of it, because the new trucks have a lot more technology that can break and cost a fortune to fix.
There’s a fight on right now to take back that power over your own vehicle. The REPAIR Act, H.R. 1566, makes carmakers give owners and independent shops the same data and tools the dealers get. A Florida Republican and a Washington Democrat introduced it together, and it cleared a House subcommittee in February. One co-sponsor is Diana Harshbarger, a Republican from East Tennessee – so this isn’t a partisan fight. What’s blocking it is the manufacturer and dealer lobby, the people making money off the lock.
One new House member doesn’t pass this alone – it takes the whole Congress. What a member does is co-sponsor it, vote for it, and make noise when it gets buried, because that’s how bills like this usually die, quietly and unwatched.
It’s not only cars. Farmers have been fighting the same battle for years. In Dyer, Obion, and Weakley it’s tractors and combines – the same lock on a machine that costs as much as a house, with a repair that can’t wait when the crop is ready. A driveway in Memphis or a field in West Tennessee, it’s your property either way.
The person who owns the thing should get to fix the thing. This is just common-sense legislation that I will fight for.