Car company’s have been doing it for decades.
There are legitimate reasoning; theft relevant parts for instance; you don’t want to enable vehicle theft and the “security through obscurity” model did work for a long time. Unfortunately for the manufacturers, most factory security systems are being cracked by locksmiths and vehicle rebirthers.
Another reason is for warranty claims. The manufacturer builds the cars to be the right balance of price, reliability, efficiency and performance. If you modify your vehicles ECU software, the engine may not be as reliable or efficient. If an “unauthorised repairer” changed the programming of the ECU, it can compromise the efficiency and reliability of the vehicle.
There are been plenty of accusations of “planned obsolescence” because a vehicle has died just out of the warranty period, after someone has fucked with the vehicle tuning.
Finally, the other reason, especially for Volume Manufacturers is that their vehicles are sold as a Loss Leader so they can make up the shortfall through aftersales.
Some vehicle importers make deals with governments to lower tariffs on new vehicles, but increase tariffs on genuine parts, like what the Japanese industry and the Australian Government made in the 1980s.
Whether you agree with this logic is irrelevant; this is the reasoning manufacturers use for restricting aftermarket parts and labour.
When a “free-market” Aftermarket Aftersales industry causes the Genuine Aftersales industry to fail, Manufacturers will try to make up any losses through other channels, like requesting government subsidies “for the good of the local industry” or selling telematics data (which just “happens” to have personal user data) to data brokers.
"Whether you agree with this logic is irrelevant; this is the reasoning manufacturers use for restricting aftermarket parts and labour."
Isn't this this the point of this community? To say we don't agree with this reasoning, whether locking people out of repairs is a good business model or not, it's one that some people don't agree with.
That is the point of this community, you are correct, but unless the Manufacturers can come up with viable alternatives, it isn’t going to change.
Are there any proactive suggestions on how Manufacturers can accommodate third party repairers without compromising the security of their customers vehicles?
I’m pretty sure that no one wants a repeat of the US Kia and Hyundai fiasco of last year?
This is an escalation the others haven't taken yet, but I'm sure they'll soon follow if they're allowed. But all prevention of repair should be illegal, not just this company.
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.
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.
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
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.
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