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Here in the USA the carmakers are bound by law to not act in a way that prevents you from repairing your own car.

The article that you cited does not seem to advance the argument in your comment, even though it opens with a story of a company getting sued for actual copyright infringement. (Ford has not sued the "ForSCAN" team.)

The carmakers are bound by law to implement the OBD2 application with an acceptable OBD2 PHY. They are also bound by law to provide their dealer system for flash-programming and for operations that cannot be carried out using the OBD2 application. Anyone can obtain a J2534 gateway to use these tools, and anyone can obtain access to these tools.

This is necessary to resolve antitrust issues and because a broken car is a potential emissions problem.

The carmakers have not stopped thirdparty diagnostic providers from reverse engineering the carmakers' tools to develop their own tools for sale. Autoenginuity, Launch X431, Snap-On are examples of companies that do this and who have no connections to the vehicle manufacturer supply chain the way that Bosch, Actia, and Continental do.




Ok, but go ahead and try to DIY your Tesla.



http://cafeelectric.com/stretchla/

“Due to the salvage status of your Model S , I have been instructed to cease providing you with parts. Tesla is very concerned about vehicles with salvaged titles being improperly repaired. Going forward, all salvaged vehicles must be inspected by us or our approved body shop, Precision Auto Body. If declared a candidate for proper repair, reconstruction must be completed by a Tesla-Certified Body Shop.”


Yeah, looks like he's still stalled.


They made like 80,000 cars, how many of these are not under warranty anymore? Documentation is available and there is already aftermarket coverage for wear items. If they fail to provide access to a necessary tool for repairs, it will be leaked and distributed, but for now almost nobody seems to care.

Tesla are a small part of the automotive industry, a low volume manufacturer making products with limited availability. I think this will likely change one day, but for now, if I ran an indy mechanic shop, and advertised Tesla services, I would be surprised to get one inquiry in a year.


Actually, since I follow /r/teslamotors, I've seen a couple of projects that involve hacking the internal network on the Tesla and hacking the giant center console touch screen's computer to do things.

Tesla doesn't really lock it down any more than they need to for safety and sanity reasons, as far as I can tell.




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