If manufacturers have to choose to adapt to regulations, or deactivate something so as not to violate them, they will surely do the latter. It is the preliminary lesson that we can draw from the Subaru case in the State of Massachusetts, to the evidence of what happened.
The State of Massachusetts added to its legal system a regulation that obliges manufacturers to collect information on their vehicles to guarantee the right to repair of their owners. The 2020 regulation expanded a previous one from 2012 and was voted by a qualified majority. Affects model / year 2022 onwards.
One of the first consequences of the entry into force of this law is that Subaru has deactivated part of the system Starlink for MY2022 vehicles, which have not yet reached their owners. According to the manufacturer, as it cannot comply with the regulations, it has no other option than to disable the system to avoid violating it.
What is Starlink? On the US Subaru website, which is also in spanish, we will see that it is a series of services connected to the Internet by subscription, from the acquisition of applications and entertainment content, to being able to request interactions with the official service, through WiFi connectivity inside the car, request for road assistance , etc.
Disabling this service effectively means that Subaru does not violate the regulations, which would force it to make the vehicle’s repair history available to users, as well as to independent repairers and outside the official Subaru network. The platform with that data does not exist and will not exist soon, argued a spokesperson.
Subaru has deactivated the remote diagnosis of the car so as not to violate the law of the State of Massachusetts
In practice, what happens is that the information accessible through the car’s diagnostic port – not connected to the Internet – could also be on an Internet server, so it could be accessed remotely.
Voices against the right to repair claim it comes out of nowhere and does not exist, and that like the right to universal health care and the right to free housing, it has been invented for political convenience. They believe that it has disadvantages such as increased costs of a new vehicle, lack of cyber security, or that it does not benefit small independent garages, only large ones.
Although we are talking about a part of a foreign country, which is on the other side of the Atlantic, and which has very different ways of understanding the world with respect to our criteria, serves as a precedent. Something similar could perfectly happen with Europe or in our own country – if it does not conflict with Community legislation.
With the arrival of certain digital services the consumer begins to be a little helpless. If you stop paying, you lose the enjoyment of the service. If the manufacturer decides to stop updating something, it reverts to the obsolete equipment or feature. If the manufacturer unilaterally decides that something stops working, they are lentils – you eat them or leave them.
Defenders of the right to repair will tell us that if there is perfect information, it can be guaranteed that the consumer fixes his vehicle where he wants, and without the repairman having a competitive disadvantage. In fact, today any mechanic can receive training courses to perform maintenance on specific models, if they are paid. For obvious reasons, this is not always done.
It is not inherently bad that manufacturers want to keep their customers more tied with additional services and digital subscriptions, it is part of making a profit from the sale of goods and services. It is legitimate. What is questionable is that the owner of the car loses functionalities or incurs disadvantages if it does not go through the hoop., or if the manufacturer decides not to go through the hoop for legal reasons.
Consumers can reward or punish certain business practices with a powerful weapon, our purchasing power. It will depend on us that some manufacturers may abuse their position, or that they are ordered to make things easier for us when we decide not to use their products or services, whatever the reason.
Subaru is not going to be the only or the last manufacturer to disable features to comply with the law, or at least not to disobey it. We will see more cases over the years, there will be manufacturers who think more about the well-being and satisfaction of their customers, and there will be others who prefer to think more about the numbers, even if their customers end up pissed off.