Right to Repair coalition submit more than 70,000 signatures for the referendum
January 19, 2023 – Advocates for the right to repair coalition submitted signatures to the secretary of the state office Thursday.
“It is a movement that ensures car owners can take their cars where they choose for their auto repair,” said Tommy Hickey with the Right to repair coalition.
The movement mirrors a similar law in Massachusetts and targets automobile diagnostic data. Tim Winkeler, President and CEO of VIP Tires & Service in Auburn says a lot of the issues are failure codes.
“when your vehicle has a check engine light or some other failure light that comes on the vehicle, sometimes that is produced by wireless data we cannot access so I cannot access the information to figure out how to diagnose it and how to fix it,” Winkeler said.
Winkler says they have the ability to get to all of the data they need in older cars because the data is on board the vehicle. Just not in the new cars.