Massachusetts Right to Repair Initiative
For some background, I&#x27;m a car nut and a longtime software engineer, and I love to tinker with my cars.<p>Cars are getting increasingly more difficult to work on yourself, regardless of manufacturer.<p>Early, purely mechanical cars were easy to work with, there was no magic, everything which made the car work was removable, tweakable.<p>Then came fuel injection. It was a mish-mash of incompatible technologies and everyone doing their own proprietary thing. The gov&#x27;t mandated the OBD and OBD-II standards into cars to allow independent servicing of the car, primarily for emissions reasons. For a while, things were simple again, since you could do basic interfacing with the cars yourself, clear codes, etc. The actual ECU maps weren&#x27;t readily available, but easy enough to reverse engineer since you could memory dump the ECU through an exposed connector or even through the OBD-II port.<p>Then came air bags and auxiliary safety systems. These were locked down and not subject to OBD rules. To reset the air bag light after fixing a bad connection requires dealer-specific tools, an independent can&#x27;t do it without acquiring these tools, which are usually prohibitively expensive, or simply not available.<p>Today, ECU&#x27;s are encrypted, impenetrable, and export the legally required minimum OBD-II spec, and that&#x27;s it. You usually have to take it to the dealer for any proprietary codes. As for tuning A&#x2F;F maps, forget about it.<p>Some cars have huge enthusiast communities, so some ECU&#x27;s get cracked, or you replace the ECU with a completely open one, but then sacrifice lots of the vehicle&#x27;s features.<p>It&#x27;s getting more difficult to be a weekend garage mechanic. Brakes and suspensions are still easy, but the engine is becoming impenetrable. A recent BMW, in which all I did was replace a dead battery, required a trip to the dealer to &quot;accept&quot; this new battery. The battery monitoring system threw a code which an independent can&#x27;t clear.