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this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
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My favorite part of the MN right to repair bill is that it requires OEM parts/software/schematics to be offered to consumers at the lowest possible price, including any rebates, sales, deals, etc. It's not quite an "at cost" situation, but it's probably about as close as you can get without crossing that line
It sounds good, but that’s enough wiggle room to drive a truck full of money through. Even “at cost” has been abused pretty badly.
Yea, I agree. I think these bills should require the maximum cost to be cost of manufacture at the date of engineering; i.e. a part designed in 2008 can not cost more than the materials to make it and it must keep that price for as long as it is used.
But progress is progress, we'll get there eventually as long as we keep up the political pressure.
Edit: please read the spirit in that example rather than to the letter. There's a lot of nuance that I just skimmed over, and that's because I don't want to write the bill.
The issue with that is it leaves no room for paying the engineers who actually designed the device. The cost of designing the parts is really expensive. I have no issue with a small markup. I definitely agree though that the costs shouldn't be so absurdly prohibitive to repair though.
Don't forget the actual cost of manufacturing. The building, the workers, the people working behind the scenes on finance or logistics, or manufacturing details...etc
Manufacturing takes a lot of people on a lot of different levels not only to get it up and running but to keep it running and that's expensive.
Tooling for manufacturing is also insanely expensive
I think that it would still leave room for engineers to be paid a living wage. After all they aren't getting paid for designing parts, they're getting paid to design a product made of interoperable parts
Even better. I thought we were just talking about the cost to provide the repair information, which should be free after so many years of shenanigans.
Good points about parts cost/availability. Hopefully ORs bill keeps costs down with the threat of competition.
That's what the auto industry does. They have to sell you access to their system to allow third parties to program modules, but that cost can be excessive, especially if a small shop only needs to program one module in a blue moon.
I was actually thinking about OBD2 when I wrote that. The old CRT pedestal style code readers cost as much as a new car, fairly reasonable from an automakers perspective but expensive enough to put plenty of small shops out of business.
It was one of the first big top-down push that I remember. It’s a pretty good parallel for the current right to repair legislation. The automakers fought it tooth and nail back then too. They made similar claims about their new cars being so complex that they simply had to be serviced at the dealerships. And, to your point, they are still getting away with it to a degree.