Submission + - Tesla does not allow people to repair their own vehicles (newrepublic.com)
smooth wombat writes: A decade ago, Rich Benoit bought a used Tesla at auction. The car had been flooded and he thought he'd repair it. When he reached out to Tesla to buy parts, they said no.
“They literally just said no,” he said. “I thought it was going to be a lot easier: ‘Hey, I’ll just buy a battery, put a battery in, put a new motor in, you know, buy some new interior parts.’ They literally said no. I’ve never seen anything like that before, and I think that’s what started the journey for me.”
Benoit’s professional background was in I.T., but this launched a new career in fixing electric cars, and he also runs a now 10-year-old YouTube channel with co-founder Carl Hewitt about his work, called Rich Rebuilds. He says nearly every electric vehicle company has responded the same way Tesla did. So his new career intersected quickly with the right-to-repair movement, which argues that companies shouldn’t be allowed to refuse access to the information and equipment people need to make repairs on the products they’ve purchased.
At least nine states have passed right-to-repair laws—most of them blue, along with Texas and Kansas—and every state has debated similar laws that would require at least some manufacturers to provide the tools people need to make repairs on their products. A federal bill is sitting in the House, waiting for potential consideration in the lame-duck session, but it’s unlikely to rise to the top of Congress’s long to-do list. For Benoit, though, this is about much more than just fixing cars. “This kind of encompasses a larger overarching theory that the corporations own what you have,” he said. “You don’t own anything. You just rent it.”
“They literally just said no,” he said. “I thought it was going to be a lot easier: ‘Hey, I’ll just buy a battery, put a battery in, put a new motor in, you know, buy some new interior parts.’ They literally said no. I’ve never seen anything like that before, and I think that’s what started the journey for me.”
Benoit’s professional background was in I.T., but this launched a new career in fixing electric cars, and he also runs a now 10-year-old YouTube channel with co-founder Carl Hewitt about his work, called Rich Rebuilds. He says nearly every electric vehicle company has responded the same way Tesla did. So his new career intersected quickly with the right-to-repair movement, which argues that companies shouldn’t be allowed to refuse access to the information and equipment people need to make repairs on the products they’ve purchased.
At least nine states have passed right-to-repair laws—most of them blue, along with Texas and Kansas—and every state has debated similar laws that would require at least some manufacturers to provide the tools people need to make repairs on their products. A federal bill is sitting in the House, waiting for potential consideration in the lame-duck session, but it’s unlikely to rise to the top of Congress’s long to-do list. For Benoit, though, this is about much more than just fixing cars. “This kind of encompasses a larger overarching theory that the corporations own what you have,” he said. “You don’t own anything. You just rent it.”
