Right to repair

Here’s an article :

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-03/does-australia-need-a-right-to-repair/

Contains some interesting stuff about motor vehicles @Shannon_Smith @AndrewDowning

The author reached out to me, but did not follow through with an interview. Anyway, there’s some stuff there I did not know.

Cheers, John.

Yep. It’s completely true.

The next move they have is that they don’t sell you a car at all, or a phone or anything of the sort. They lease it to you and then it’s not yours so you don’t have a right to repair. That’s the way Tesla is trying to go and get around it.

Kind Regards,
Shannon

Well, the shift to self driving vehicles is going to drive (no pun intended) a huge shift away from car ownership. Owning a vehicle will just be a waste of time, when you can just have the use of whatever vehicle you need, when you need it, and not care about maintenance, petrol, road rules, skills, cops, tiredness, drug/alcohol, kids, accidents insurance, breakdowns etc.

There will still be owners for a while. They will be the fleet owners and a variety of individual investors. They will most likely not be allowed to do their own repair, because the interaction between the mechanical’s and the control systems will create complex liability issues around insurance unless one party (the manufacturer) is responsible for all aspect (self driving control, updates, mechanical, maintenance).
This actually makes it more likely that the owners and manufacturers will be the same entity because their costs will be lower, since they get vehicle and parts at cost, and they get to do all integration and test in-house, at manufacturing time and at maintenance time. This should also cause them to eliminate planed obsolescence, since they’d only be harming themselves.

An initiative by government for comment - I’ll try to put something in.