this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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Right to Repair

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Whether it be electronics, automobiles or medical equipment, the manufacturers should not be able to horde “oem” parts, render your stuff useless if you repair it with aftermarket parts, or hide schematics of their products.

I Fix It Repair Manifesto

Summary article from I Fix It

Summary video by Marques Brownlee

Great channel covering and advocating right to repair, Lewis Rossman

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Tesla released the service manuals for their original Roadster yesterday, pretty rare to come across any kind of service manual nowadays. Great for R2R!

https://service.tesla.com/roadster

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

I was pretty careful in specifically not naming this a "win", just "great". A true "win" would be a recent model as you mention.

Personally however, it's not 1980s/90s anymore where recieving a service manual with your purchased property was the minimum standard - I feel the bar is pretty low in general when discussing companies' attitudes providing owners with the full documentation and firmware for their property

I thought this was noteworthy, taking into account Tesla's previously horrible attitude towards people who repair and rebuild totalled teslas, where the company subsequently remotely disables onboard features such as autopilot and the ability to use a supercharger as soon as they find out. This car has neither of those features of course, but it at least hopefully sets some kind of precedent.

Despite the age and production quantities, it's still extremely rare for any company/manufacturer to actually release these materials to the public IMO - particularly including the firmware and diagnostics tools on GitHub, meaning owners don't need to waste time reverse engineering their own vehicle, or be stuck paying someone else to figure out why it isn't working...

Hopefully this move helps encourage more auto manufacturers to start releasing resources for their vehicles to the public, instead of restricting these to specific dealers (some of which thankfully leak some to the public 👌)