The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has become the unlikely vanguard of the movement to give car owners the right to repair their own vehicles. Now the US federal government is threatening to get in the way.
This week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the US vehicle safety regulator, warned automakers not to comply with nearly three-year-old state law that requires them to share vehicle data with owners and independent auto repair shops. In a letter, a lawyer for the government argued that giving customers and repairers access to the vehicle systems demanded by Massachusetts could also make them available to hackers, who could then access steering, acceleration, braking, or electronics systems.
The conflict dates to 2020, when Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure granting them the right to repair their cars. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade association representing global auto manufacturers, filed a suit to prevent the law from going into effect. It argued that the law was preempted by federal vehicle safety rules—in other words, not the sort of thing Massachusetts voters could decide—and created safety risks by opening up its vehicles to manipulation. The federal judge overseeing the lawsuit has yet to decide on the case, and the federal government had stayed mum on it until this month.
So now the right-to-repair movement faces another setback. Massachusetts says its law is good for car consumers. The federal government says it’s bad for car safety.
What does the new twist in this right-to-repair case mean for the state’s car owners, repairers, and dealers? At this point, confusion. “Massachusetts consumers don’t know their rights because of how long this is taking,” says Tommy Hickey, who leads the Massachusetts Right to Repair Coalition (and now a Maine group trying to pass a similar law there.) Meanwhile, new car owners in Massachusetts who have lost access to some safety and comfort features as a result of the legal fight have been left in the lurch.
On June 1, the Massachusetts attorney general defied the legal logjam and began distributing paperwork to new car buyers informing them of their rights to access all the mechanical data created by their cars to help them diagnose, maintain, and repair their vehicles. In a statement, Massachusetts first assistant attorney general, Pat Moore, questioned why the federal government chose to weigh in on the issue now. (NHTSA did not respond to questions about the timing of the letter.)
The federal government’s stance in Massachusetts appears to conflict with its general views on the right to repair. In 2021, President Joe Biden ordered the Federal Trade Commission to create new rules making it harder for manufacturers to limit who can fix the devices they create.
Amid competing letters, statements, and legal paperwork there’s a fundamental question, one that Massachusetts tried to find the answer to: Who owns the reams of data created by today’s increasingly software- and computer-chip-enabled vehicles?
For decades, those advocating for the right to repair—that is, the idea that once you buy a product, you get to decide how to fix it—held up the auto industry as one that was doing it right. Car repair has long been the domain of the at-home tinkerer. As a result, independent auto repair shops and aftermarket parts manufacturers have made billions of dollars tuning and fixing vehicles.
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