Car Companies Say Home Repairs Are 'Legally Problematic,' Seek Copyright Restrictions

originally posted by: Redwookieaz
a reply to: infolurker
This is ridiculous...
I read somewhere that John Deere is currently trying to do the same thing with their farming equipment...

I found it:
www.wired.com...

It’s official: John Deere and General Motors want to eviscerate the notion of ownership. Sure, we pay for their vehicles. But we don’t own them. Not according to their corporate lawyers, anyway.

In a particularly spectacular display of corporate delusion, John Deere—the world’s largest agricultural machinery maker —told the Copyright Office that farmers don’t own their tractors.

Because computer code snakes through the DNA of modern tractors, farmers receive “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.” It’s John Deere’s tractor, folks. You’re just driving it.

there will come a day when auto shops go the way of book and record stores. in the early 2000s cars started coming with transmissions that could only be serviced at the dealership. soon the rest of the car will be the same way. and don't think you can get a way with driving a classic. if you have a classic now, its considered a historic vehicle. next step will be banning classics for public roads to keep all the self driving cars safe. the future is Lego cars made from 3-d printers

It's not just the US. Over the last 10 years, European motorcycle groups have been fighting EU type approval legislation.
If enacted it will mean that only manufacturer approved spares and accessories can be used.

Bye bye custom bike industry, bye bye affordable servicing...

Once bikes are hit with it, they'll come for the cars.

a reply to: liejunkie01

There are only three instances you should buy American. You need a truck, want a Jeep (and they're hit or miss) or you want a corvette. The rest are getting better, but it's Japanese or European for me for the foreseeable future.

originally posted by: Domo1
a reply to: liejunkie01

There are only three instances you should buy American. You need a truck, want a Jeep (and they're hit or miss) or you want a corvette. The rest are getting better, but it's Japanese or European for me for the foreseeable future.

I think your talking to the sort that would buy a wheelbarrow for a car if it had a made in USA cause of patrotism derp derp.

Luckily there is a HUGE group of manufacturers on the other side of this argument and they are quite competently represented by SEMA.

Nothing will come of this.

I find it funny they are trying to tell people they don't own their vehicles, but I bet they'll start calling if you stop making your payments....

I guess i'll just go 'Old School' and build my own car. I particularly like the Modified 1920 Briggs and Stratton "Red Bug"


Easy solution.

a reply to: infolurker


Home repairs and modification will raise warranty issues how ever over and above they have should have no recourse.

Important to note that they are talking about people messing with the electronic software controls of "steering, throttle inputs and braking"

a reply to: infolurker

Great thread !

Personally, my current daily driver is a Saab. I don't risk anything.
I kept an eye on the community of enthusiasts who turn old cars into electric vehicles : diyelectriccar, but in Europe, it's too difficult in order to keep the vehicle road-legal, too expensive to get parts, and not interesting when you see the range and performance that DIYers manage to achieve.

On the same topic :

a reply to: infolurker
AHH Man this means that our US made Car Parts can
only be Replaced with OEM Parts Made in China & Mexico.
I was Hoping to get some Decent Parts Made In the OL US of A.

LOL

originally posted by: liejunkie01
a reply to: pheonix358

Don't buy US made cars. It is that simple.

Let me fix that for you.



Don't buy foreign made cars. It is that simple.



As an American I have to support Americam jobs.



Although this sounds ridiculous, it still stands that us here in the states need to help supportan iinfrastructure that will help support us.

I support bringing manufacturing jobs back to America and look for American products to buy but a car is not one of them.

I had an American car that was a piece of junk. Never again. I'm single and need a dependable car since I drive a lot with my job.

I've had a Honda Civic for the last 12 years and it's a wonderful, dependable car.

this is not the first time U.S car companies have tried to get a law like this passed.

i can't remember all the details but, it was in the late 80's or 90's back when they started put more and more electronics in cars they were lobbying congress to pass laws that made it so you had to take your car back to the dealers to have them worked on.

i want to say that the reason it didn't happen is because the after market parts and independent repair garage market was so huge that they were able to counter that. some think that is one of the reasons cars have become so complicated. manufacturers would build them so you had no choice, and drive the little man out of business.

it was right after that that cars due to what ever you want blame it on started to become more and more complicated, and cost for the diagnostic equipment became outrageous.

i tried to do a search for this, i guess my search skills are lacking this morning.

Rather than move forward with killing the backyard mechanics and tool industry I'd like to see all manuafactorers reverse the crap they've already done with making vehicles so damned impossible to work on and adding complicated s*** in there that don't need to be added like these stupid 300 dollar chip keys to start your vehicle. And if they don't do that I'd like to see them all lined up and horse whipped until they agree to reverse it.

Did we really need fuel injection on gas engines? Its fine when its new and working well but sooner or later its gonna be a problem. I'm sure it offers more power and better fuel mileage but is it worth it?

Look up Injector fuse keeps blowing and see how many hits you get. When that fuse blows it puts you on the side of the road if you make it that far and if you don't have a fuse your screwed.

Is it a bad wire or injector causing the fuse to blow?
What if a new fuse blows soon as you put it in? Screwed again! All new injectors will cost up to 1000 and more to have them installed. In other words its gonna be a very costly repair to diagnose this problem that didn't use to exist in gasonline engines plus now your gonna have to pay a towing fee.

There have always been different issues with vehicles but blown fuel inection fuse or bad injector was not on the list.

Coil Packs Lovem
There is one thing I like that manufacturer's are doing with todays vehicles over vehicles of the past but its too expensive, way too expensive.

Example The first electronic control module I became familiar with was in an 85 Ford Bronco . It was an improvement over the old points and condensor system that put everyone on the side of the road in the 70's when they hit a water puddle during heavy rain and water got under the hood and wet the points.
But if the single module failed you were screwed and glued until you got a new one. So keep a spare right? And that's what we did afterwards..

The one in the 85 Bronco put me and my Dad on the road walking while on the way to a family vacation. We finally got a ride to the nearest Napa auto and bought the module for 70 bucks. That's one unit to fire all 8 cylinders for 70 bucks and if it quits your screwed and glued.

Now they have one module or coil pack per cylinder and if one quits your not screwed and glued to the side of the road, your just going to have a skipping car until you get where your going and can diagnose the misfiring coil pack and replace it. The problem with these are you cant get them all for the 70 buck price the single unit that fired all the cylinders used to cost. That's right they wont nearly 70 bucks a piece for every damned one of them which is outrageous. Its a better system but outrageous pricing and there are many other things like this way over priced.

Individual Coil packs are probably one of the single best real improvements that's been made in years in the automotive industry but they want 8 times too much for it. It cost exactly 8 times more to do the same job of firing all 8 cylinder that the single unit did in 1985.

In fact the only downside to individual coil packs is you don't just automatically know which cylinder is misfiring. You can find out but not without some handy tools.

The manufacturer's could have with all their computer BS told the customer which cylinder is misfiring so they'd know which coil pack to change. It could come up on the dash like any other warning light or message.

Well my experience is that the computer side of cars is now better than it was say 10 years or more ago when every manufacturer used their own proprietary system which could only be interrogated with a custom scanner they'd charge ridiculous prices for, limiting such servicing to major dealerships.

At least a standard has been adopted now (OBDII) allowing virtually anyone to read/reset their trouble codes with a $20 or less bluetooth module and a smartphone or laptop/tablet, I even built my own interface that allows me to check my own vehicles via a USB port. Getting the info on what the trouble codes actually mean can be an issue still but manufacturers are loosening up with that data these days and pretty much any data can be found with Google now. OBDII became mandatory on all new vehicles in Oz in 2006 making us one of the last to make it universal, USA was about 10 years before that.

When it comes to mechanical repairs, there's some really shonky work done in backyard sheds still which make for some very unsafe vehicles on the road and that's what 'they' are trying to curb for good reason. The average car owner these days does little more than change the oil because the sytems (engine management, ABS, etc) appear so complex to them. Most new car owners have extended warranties that require regular servicing at approved workshops to keep the warranty (some up to 7 years now) so I know many motorists who hardly ever do any more than wash the car and check the tyre pressures.

When warranty expires: trade it in on a new one.

a reply to: Voyager1


i had a olds cutlas supreme, i want to say it was a 92 been a while not real sure of the year now, everything on that car was electronic.
one day it started running rough blowing black smoke, would go dead and spit and spudder , and using way to much fuel, but it didn't do it all the time just intermittently and at the most inopportune times, or right after first starting up.
i drove it that way for about a week.

i've always repaired my own vehicles., so during this time i was checking everything that had to do with fuel, you know black smoke means to much gas. checked fuel rails, regulator, injectors,sensors, egr, i even checked the coil pack. everything that had to do with the fuel and air systems checked good.

i had a buddy that owned a repair shop and he had got one of those fancy new diagnostic computers, at that time they were fairly new and this bas___d stood about six feet and about four foot wide, had all kinds of leads and attachments for it. now they got hand held ones and laptops, so we hooked it up.

anyway we tested everything on that damn car, things i didn't know existed. couldn't find the problem. while we were standing there trying to figure out what to check next the car over heated, turns out that this car had three senors for the cooling system, one for the fan mounted on the radiator , one for the gage in the block, and one for the ecm on the block, and all of them check good. so we shotgunned it and replaced everyone of them. then the car never did the rough running thing again.

my buddy knew some people that worked at the olds dealer and called them. it turned out that one of the temp sensors sent a signal to the computer to tell the car that it was warmed up and to change the fuel ratio, and that they could fail causing the system to go into a closed loop and flood the engine.

there is entirely to much bs on cars today and to many redundancies, but that's how they justify this crap that they are doing.

I've had some vehicle issues over the years and the ECM systems have been a big help in tracking down the faults. Things like intermittent crank angle sensors, failed oxygen sensors, temperature etc bring up a trouble code that's kept in the computer and can be read easily telling you exactly what wasn't normal, even if it happened just once or twice weeks earlier. Had a real interesting on one car that would occasionally run very very rough with little power plus the catalytic converter almost red hot (fire risk). Turned out to be simply a loose connection and the computer was indicating an ignition signal fail, the loose connection was confirmation to the computer that the coil had fired and the intermittent signal for some reason was messing up the injector timing causing majorly rich running.

These days I don't do anything without reading the trouble codes first (saves a lot of time and unnecessary expense).

originally posted by: infolurker
Another revenue stream or valid argument?

I feel any mods or repairs are your choice. You may void the warranty but it is not the manufacturer's business on what you do with your own property after purchase.

www.autoblog.com...

Automakers to gearheads: Stop repairing cars

Automakers are supporting provisions in copyright law that could prohibit home mechanics and car enthusiasts from repairing and modifying their own vehicles.

In comments filed with a federal agency that will determine whether tinkering with a car constitutes a copyright violation, OEMs and their main lobbying organization say cars have become too complex and dangerous for consumers and third parties to handle.

Allowing them to continue to fix their cars has become "legally problematic," according to a written statement from the Auto Alliance, the main lobbying arm of automakers.

The dispute arises from a section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that no one thought could apply to vehicles when it was signed into law in 1998. But now, in an era where cars are rolling computing platforms, the U.S. Copyright Office is examining whether provisions of the law that protect intellectual property should prohibit people from modifying and tuning their cars.

As a grease monkey this very idea pisses me off to the core. More often I get customers coming in with sealed transmissions that have to be serviced by a stealership. Common wear parts engineered way more complex than they need to be for the sake of "innovation" and put on in a way you basically have to reach up your posterior to remove. Hell its not like the actual dealership techs even do the job right anyways, some do but I quit taking my cars to any shop years ago. Now for big things like a re-spray or transmission/engine rebuild you can still find reputable guys in the private sector that do amazingly detailed work and will go the extra steps. But for the most part chain shops will rip you off, charge you for premium parts like AC Delco, Timken, Edelbrock, Borla and NGK, but then use economy crap like Value Craft, econocraft or whatever store brand they use which are usually re-package economy parts but with a lifetime warranty.

Yeah that lifetime warranty sounds good but you might as well pay the extra money for original O.E. parts that actually work in the long haul. Brake pads are fine, you replace those anyways, Alternators? ICMs? TPSs and IACs, get the real deal. Newer cars are horrible, they are purposely making it more difficult than it has to be to work on them. You want proof? I got your proof, go purchase yourself a 2012 Chevy Impala and then a 1994 Impala (has to be an SS or what`s the point) and just do a tune up, basic tune up. If you do the 2012 first, the 1994 seems like a vacation. I personally will not but anything younger than maybe 2003-05 and even those bought after then would be a select few GMs and a Ford. I`ll get suckered in on the Challengers though. Nothing against cars from around the world neither, I like plenty of them to list for awhile but my knowledge comes from working on American cars.

I have heard that a lot of these restrictions come from long time mechanics that can run an old school Lincoln without emissions controls that produce just as much if not less emissions than cars complete with Cat converters, EGRs etc. There was even a really old classic from the 1930s or `40s that could run cleaner than newer cars today.

I love cars, I love working on cars, I love modifying my cars and I will continue to do so. I`ve leaned more on my own doing this sort of work than I ever could in a classroom and it is a blast. They wont stop me.

You cannot even tell its modified to the untrained eye...and that's how you get away with it.


a reply to: hounddoghowlie

Those GM W-body cars run bad longer than most cars run at all. I love them, easy to work on simple to diagnos and treasure yards are full of spare parts, well the 2nd Gen W-bodies after 1997 anyways, 1st gens have mostly been crushed when the cash for clunker BS was going down. Thats one thing some classic car owners can be proud of the fact their late 80s to mid 90s vintage cars are survivors.

a reply to: infolurker

There is nothing legit about this so why even ask the question?

a reply to: liejunkie01

For the most part many Japanese cars are made here in the US. Nissan is supposed to be considered an import car but yet they make them by the millions here in Smyrna TN. I was given the offer to work for them at 16/hr but the Japanese management will not shake your hand or allow you to look them in the eye and require you to bow. F that, I like the cars and dig Tokyo and the people I met there who would look you in the eye and shake your hand and bowed in return as is their custom. But here we are basically a serf to that management regime.