Maine Still Hashing Out The Details Of Its Year Old ‘Right To Repair’ Law As Auto Lobbyists Loom

Policy

from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept

A little over a year ago, Maine residents voted overwhelmingly (83 percent) to pass a new state right to repair law designed to make auto repairs easier and more affordable. More specifically, the law requires that automakers standardize on-board diagnostic systems and provide remote access to those systems and mechanical data to consumers and third-party independent repair shops.

But as we’ve seen with other states that have passed right to reform laws (most notably New York), passing the law isn’t the end of the story. Corporate lobbyists have had great success not just watering these laws down before passage, but after voters approve them.

Maine’s original and vague law requires manufacturers to give car owners, independent repair shops and licensed dealers transparent access to vehicle data for repair and diagnostic purposes. It also demanded the creation of a Maine Automotive Right to Repair Working Group to determine the contours of the law and help build an independent entity to govern vehicle data transmitted to independent repair shops.

That’s become… a complicated process.

The original law included no key definitions, so they’ve got to nail those down. There are also discussions over whether the law should require “independent repair facilities to be bonded, disclose the extent of warranty protections for performed work, notify customers whether technicians are manufacturer-certified, and inform customers whether OEM parts are used in repairs.”

Much of the debate is over ensuring language is specific enough so that it can’t be abused by inevitable lawsuits by industry. Other debates have emerged about how tough consumer privacy enforcement should be (automakers, I’ll remind you, have some of the worst privacy and security standards in all of tech).

As these debates rage, automaker lobbyists have been looming over the process for much of the last year, working tirelessly to erode the strength (and even rewrite) significant chunks of the law.

Once the law is finally passed, assuming it has any actual teeth, enforcement becomes another issue. In all of the states where new right to repair laws have been passed, most corporations are simply ignoring the laws. I’m not sure I’ve seen a single enforcement action yet in any of the eleven states that have passed various right to repair protections.

With the Trumpist attack on coherent federal governance shoveling a ton of legal fights to the state level (immigration, consumer protection, environmental protection, labor), I strongly suspect that enforcing new right to repair laws with any consistency isn’t going to be a top priority for cash-strapped states fighting a thousand different major battles on a thousand different fronts.

Still, the movement itself, very bipartisan in nature, shows no sign of slowing down, and only seems to get stronger the more companies attempt to monopolize repair.

Filed Under: automakers, maine, privacy, right to repair