Cars – Page 4

How GM’s Super Cruise went from limo driving to lane changes and towing

Cars, Super Cruise / Kris Guyer / January 13, 2025

The Unified Lateral Controller

The algorithm that handles all of that is called the Unified Lateral Controller. “So it’s a single software stack, but it is also modular to adapt with different vehicle configurations, with different driving scenarios, different maneuvers,” Zarringhalam said.

“Let’s imagine that you’re driving a Super Cruise vehicle, and you indicate to the left, or the system automatically decides to make a lane change to the left, and then, for whatever reason, the driver decides that they want to go back, mid-maneuver; they want to go back to the original lane. So you can just indicate to the opposite side, in this case, the right-hand side. Under the hood, in this scenario, everything is jumping. Our target trajectory is jumping from a left-lane maneuver to a right turn. The turn can be very sharp. There could be other objects that narrow the envelope of operation that you’re allowed to function in,” Zarringhalam said.

Again, that behavior has to be consistent and predictable, whether it’s below freezing or in the middle of a heatwave, and things like tire wear must also be taken into account. Or, say, the presence of a trailer, which could be anything from a bike rack with wheels to a three-axle trailer.

“As soon as we detect that the trailer is attached, we run several real-time algorithms—trailer inertial parameters, trailer math, trailer configuration, even how many axles we have, and the control adapts itself to execute lane turning and keep both the vehicle and the trailer at the center of the road,” Zarringhalam said.

That’s done automatically without the driver having to input the information (obviating the problem of someone entering the wrong details), “and if you change the loading or the trailer configuration, even mid-drive—if you pull over, load more weight and continue driving on the same road with Super Cruise active—these learnings happen in a matter of seconds,” Zarringhalam said.

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Tesla’s Model Y crossover finally gets a facelift—just in China for now

Cars, Tesla Model Y / Rejus Almole / January 11, 2025

Yesterday, Tesla revealed a facelift for its bestselling Model Y crossover. Or at least it did if you live in China—customers in the US and Europe will need to continue to wait for the revamped electric vehicle.

Better efficiency was a goal—in the past, Tesla simply ignored complaints over its exaggerated range claims, but now it says the Model Y, codenamed “Juniper,” has updated suspension, wheels, and tires that “make the driving experience smoother and quieter.”

Tesla says that range has increased from 427 miles (688 km) to 446 miles (719 km), albeit under the Chinese efficiency testing regime, which produces very different numbers from the more realistic tests used by the US Environmental Protection Agency.

More obvious are the new treatments for the front and rear, with a full-width daylight running light at the front and a full-width rear light. On the inside, Tesla has added ventilated front seats and an infotainment screen for the rear passengers, and there are now blindspot monitors, all additions that will help Tesla stay close to feature parity with its many rivals in that market.

Chinese customers will be expected to pay a price premium for the facelifted model, however. Tesla has increased the price by more than 5 percent, although at $35,939 (263,500 yuan) before incentives, it remains far cheaper than the $44,990 starting price for the Model Y in the US.

Speaking of the US, consumers here wishing to buy a facelifted Model Y probably have a few more months before that becomes possible. The even more outdated Model 3 received its “Highland” update in China in September 2023, with European sales starting a month later, but in the US, the revamped Model 3 only appeared in early 2024. A similar wait for the “Juniper” Model Y should be expected, as the company will need to refit its Model Y production lines at its factories in Germany, California, and Texas before that can happen.

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Only 5 percent of US car buyers want an EV, according to survey

Cars, EV adoption / Tim Belzer / January 11, 2025

Only 5 percent of US consumers want their next vehicle to be a battery electric vehicle, according to a new survey by Deloitte. The consulting company gathered data from more than 31,000 people across 30 countries as part of its 2025 Global Automotive Consumer Study, and some of the results are rather interesting, as they pertain to technologies like new powertrains, connectivity, and artificial intelligence.

Among US consumers, internal combustion engines (ICE) remain number one, with 62 percent indicating that their next car will not be electrified. Another 1 in 5 would like a hybrid for their next vehicle, with a further 6 percent desiring a plug-in hybrid. (The remaining survey respondents either did not know or wanted some other powertrain option.)

By contrast, only 38 percent of Chinese consumers want to stick with ICE; meanwhile, 27 percent of them want a BEV next. That’s a far higher percentage than in other large nations—in Germany, only 14 percent want a BEV; in the UK and Canada, only 8 percent are BEV-bound; and in Japan, the number is a mere 3 percent.

Meanwhile, hybrids are far more attractive to consumers in most countries. While only 16 percent of Chinese and 12 percent of German consumers indicated this preference, 23 percent of Canadians, 24 percent of UK consumers, and 35 percent of Japanese consumers replied that they were looking for a hybrid for their next car.

Deloitte suspects that some of this reticence toward BEVs “could be due, in part, to lingering affordability concerns.” The hoped-for parity in the cost of a BEV powertrain and an ICE powertrain has still not arrived, and fully 45 percent of US consumers said they did not want to pay more than $34,999 for their next car (11 percent said less than $15,000, 9 percent said $15,000–$19,999, and the remaining 25 percent said $20,000–$34,999.)

Why the reticence?

Despite popular sentiment, there are actually quite a few electric vehicles available for much less than the average new vehicle price of $47,000. But other than the Nissan Leaf, all of them have prices starting with a “3.” (Meanwhile, 75 percent of car buyers in the US buy used cars, and the transition to electrification will not change that underlying reality.)

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“I’m getting dizzy”: Man films Waymo self-driving car driving around in circles

Cars, Policy, self-driving, waymo / Kris Guyer / January 6, 2025

Waymo says the problem only caused a delay of just over five minutes and that Johns was not charged for the trip. A spokesperson for Waymo, which is owned by Google parent Alphabet, told Ars today that the “looping event” occurred on December 9 and was later addressed during a regularly scheduled software update.

Waymo did not answer our question about whether the software update only addressed routing at the specific location the problem occurred at, or a more general routing problem that could have affected rides in other locations.

The problem affecting Johns’ ride occurred near the user’s pickup location, Waymo told us. The Waymo car took the rider to his destination after the roughly five-minute delay, the spokesperson said. “Our rider support agent did help initiate maneuvers that helped resolve the issue,” Waymo said.

Rider would like an explanation

CBS News states that Johns is “still not certain he was communicating with a real person or AI” when he spoke to the support rep in the car. However, the Waymo spokesperson told Ars that “all of our rider support staff are trained human operators.”

Waymo told Ars that the company tried to contact Johns after the incident and left him a voicemail. Johns still says that he never received an explanation of what caused the circling problem.

We emailed Johns today and received a reply from a public relations firm working on his behalf. “To date, Mike has not received an explanation as to the reason for the circling issue,” his spokesperson said. His spokesperson confirmed that Johns did not miss his flight.

It wasn’t clear from the video whether Johns tried to use the “pull over” functionality available in Waymo cars. “If at any time you want to end your ride early, tap the Pull over button in your app or on the passenger screen, and the car will find a safe spot to stop,” a Waymo support site says.

Johns’ spokesperson told us that “Mike was not immediately aware of the ‘pull over’ button,” so “he did not have an opportunity to use it before engaging with the customer service representative over the car speaker.”

While Waymo says all its agents are human, Johns’ spokesperson told Ars that “Mike is still unsure if he was speaking with a human or an AI agent.”

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VW will offer “highly competitive” leases on ID.4 as sales restart

auto recall, Cars, Volkswagen ID.4 / Mike M. / January 3, 2025

Last September, faulty door handle hardware caused Volkswagen to take the rather drastic steps of suspending sales and production of the electric crossover, as well as recalling almost 100,000 customer cars. Now, it says it has new parts that will allow it to fix existing cars, lift the stop-sale order, and soon, resume production at its factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

The ID.4, like many new EVs, features flush door handles in service of the all-important effort of drag reduction. Instead of conventional mechanical handles that interrupt the laminar air flow down the side of the car, VW instead went with an electromechanical solution.

Unfortunately, the door handle assemblies weren’t sufficiently waterproofed, allowing the electronics inside to corrode. Consequently, early last year VW started getting complaints of ID.4s with doors that would intermittently open while driving, with reporting almost 300 warranty claims by September, when it pulled the car from sale, issued the recall, and stopped the production line.

That line will restart “in the coming weeks,” VW says, and now that there are new and improved door handles available, dealers will now be able to complete the recall. That also means that any ID.4s in inventory can be fixed and then sold. To sweeten the deal, the automaker says that it will offer some “highly competitive lease offers,” as it hopes to send its clean crossover back up the sales charts.

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The 2025 Honda Civic Hybrid: A refreshing alternative to a crossover

ars_approved, car review, Cars, Honda Civic Hybrid / Mike M. / January 3, 2025

The Honda Civic Hybrid powertrain. — This is the hybrid powertrain. Credit: Honda

And that can be tempting. The car we tested is much more pedestrian than the Type-R, but from the driver’s seat, it wants to eat corners almost as ravenously as that track-tuned model. That surprised me because the Type-R uses a limited slip differential, and these more sedate models do not. This is indeed a car that will reward you for hustling it down a twisty road should the desire arise.

The paddles on the steering wheel increase or decrease the amount of regenerative braking you experience when you lift the throttle rather than changing (non-existent) gears. Turned off, the Civic Hybrid will coast down the road with aplomb; in its strongest setting, it’s not quite one-pedal driving.

The driving position is now rather low-slung for a normal passenger car, no doubt a feeling exacerbated by a driving diet too-heavy in crossovers and SUVs, but you don’t feel quite as close to the ground as you might in, say, an MX-5. Visibility is good, and the ergonomics/HMI deserves praise for the fact that most of the controls are physical buttons. The air vents even have little machined metal stalks to aim them.

It’s a well-thought out interior. Honda

It’s also easy to live with. The hatchback means loading cargo is no hassle, although at this price point, you have to close your own tailgate; there is no motor assistance. The front and rear are spacious enough, considering the class of car, and there are plenty of USB-C ports for people to use to recharge their stuff. The heated front seats heated up very quickly on cold days, although a heated steering wheel would have been a nice addition.

The Sport Touring Hybrid we tested also comes with a 9-inch Android Automotive-based infotainment system that includes a full suite of Google’s automotive services, as well as Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. And all Civics come with Honda Sensing, the company’s suite of advanced driver assistance systems. Unusually for a Honda, we didn’t even notice that many false positive alerts for the forward collision warning.

In all, I find very little reason not to recommend the Civic Hatchback Hybrid to people looking for a fun and efficient car that’s not too huge, too expensive, or too dependent on touchscreens.

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How NASCAR and its teams are embracing 3D printing

3D printing, Cars, NASCAR, racing / Tim Belzer / January 2, 2025

Carbon fiber, aluminum, maybe the odd bit of titanium here or there: These are the materials we usually expect race cars to be made of. Now you can start adding thermoplastics like Ultem to the list. Additive manufacturing has become a real asset in the racer’s toolbox, although the technology has actually been used at the track longer than you might think.

“Some people think that 3D printing was invented last year,” said Fadi Abro, senior global director of automotive and mobility at Stratasys. The company recently became NASCAR’s official 3D printing partner, but it has a relationship with one of the teams—Joe Gibbs Racing—that stretches back two decades.

“Now the teams only have certain things that they can touch in the vehicle, but what that does is it makes it so that every microscopic advantage you can get out of that one tiny detail that you have control over is so meaningful to your team,” Abro said.

Currently, JGR has five printers, which it uses in a variety of applications. Some are common to other industries—additive manufacturing is a good way to quickly develop new prototypes, as well as tooling and fixtures. But the team also prints parts that go straight onto the race car, like housings, ducts, and brackets.

“These are elements that are really integral for the vehicle to be on the track. If there are changes they want to make, they throw it to the printer, it prints overnight, and you have a part that can go on a track that’s specific to that track. So that gives them a competitive advantage,” Abro said.

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Whistleblower finds unencrypted location data for 800,000 VW EVs

Cars, connected cars, data breach, Electric vehicles, EVs, Online Privacy, Volkswagen, vw / Paul Patrick / December 30, 2024

Connected cars are great—at least until some company leaves unencrypted location data on the Internet for anyone to find. That’s what happened with over 800,000 EVs manufactured by the Volkswagen Group, after Cariad, an automative software company that handles much of the development tasks for VW, left several terabytes of data unprotected on Amazon’s cloud.

According to Motor1, a whistleblower gave German publication Der Spiegel and hacking collective Chaos Computer Club a heads-up about the misconfiguration. Der Spiegel and CCC then spent some time sifting through the data, with which allowed them to tie individual cars to their owners.

“The security hole allowed the publication to track the location of two German politicians with alarming precision, with the data placing a member of the German Defense Committee at his father’s retirement home and at the country’s military barracks,” wrote Motor1.

Cariad has since patched the vulnerability, which had revealed data about the usage of Skodas, Audis, and Seats, as well as what Motor1 calls “incredibly detailed data” for VW ID.3 and ID.4 owners. The data set also included pinpoint location data for 460,000 of the vehicles, which Der Spiegel said could be used to paint a picture of their owners’ lives and daily activities.

Cariad ascribed the vulnerability to a “misconfiguration,” according to Der Spiegel, and said there is no indication that anyone aside from the publication and CCC accessed the unprotected data.

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Hertz continues EV purge, asks renters if they want to buy instead of return

Cars, chevy, Chevy Bolt, Electric vehicles, EVs, Hertz, Tesla, tesla model 3 / Kris Guyer / December 27, 2024

Apparently Hertz’s purging of electric vehicles from its fleet isn’t going fast enough for the car rental giant. A Reddit user posted an offer they received from Hertz to buy the 2023 Tesla Model 3 they had been renting for $17,913.

Hertz originally went strong into EVs, announcing a plan to buy 100,000 Model 3s for its fleet by the end of 2021, but 16 months later had acquired only half that amount. The company found that repair costs—especially for Teslas, which averaged 20 percent more than other EVs—were cutting into its profit margins. Customer demand was also not what Hertz had hoped for; last January, it announced plans to sell off 20,000 EVs.

Asking its customers if they want to purchase their rentals isn’t a new strategy for Hertz. “By connecting our rental customers who opt into our emails to our sales channels, we’re not only building awareness of the fact that we sell arsenal but also offering a unique opportunity to someone who may be in the market for the same car they have on rent,” Hertz communications director Jamie Line told The Verge.

Hertz is advertising a limited 12-month, 12,000-mile powertrain warranty for each EV, and customers will have seven days to return the car in case of profound buyer’s regret.

According to The Verge, offers have ranged from $18,422 for a 2023 Chevy Bolt to $28,500 for a Polestar 2. We spotted some good deals from Hertz when we last checked, with some still eligible for a federal tax credit.

Hertz’s EV sell off may be winding down, however. Last March we saw more than 2,100 BEVs for sale on the company’s used car site. When we checked this morning, there were just 175 left.

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Honda and Nissan to merge, Honda will take the lead

Cars, honda, Nissan / Tim Belzer / December 23, 2024

In 2019, then-head of the alliance Carlos Ghosn was arrested by Japanese police on charges of financial misconduct. After three months under house arrest, Ghosn fled the country and Japan’s criminal justice system, which rarely returns a not guilty verdict.

What about Renault, Mitsubishi?

Last year, Nissan agreed to invest $663 million into Renault’s EV activities; at the same time Renault gave up the majority of its shares in Nissan, reducing the stake of each company owned by the other, down to 15 percent. That was meant to lead to “a broader range of EV products and powertrains,” said Uchida at the time. But evidently it was decided that this arrangement was not sufficient to improve Nissan’s electric vehicle portfolio.

For its part, Mitsubishi says it will monitor the situation and decide whether or not to join at a later date. Meanwhile Renault said in a statement that “as the main shareholder of Nissan, Renault Group will consider all options based on the best interest of the Group and its stakeholders. Renault Group continues to execute its strategy and to roll-out projects that create value for the Group, including projects already launched within the Alliance.”

Assuming nothing throws a spanner in these particular works, the deal will be finalized by next June, with the new holding company for the two OEMs created by August 2026. Honda will take the lead of the new enterprise, in large part thanks to its larger market capitalization. But Mibe said that any real payoff from the merger wouldn’t be realized until after 2030. The hope is that shared development costs and greater purchasing scale will help drive down costs, but both companies will continue existing partnerships such as that between Honda-GM as well.

We can expect more shared vehicle platforms between Honda and Nissan, as well as deeper cooperation at the R&D stage. But there are also plans to optimize manufacturing, including facilities, as well as integrating supply chains and even sales financing to find cost savings and efficiencies.

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Human versus autonomous car race ends before it begins

A2RL, autonomous cars, Cars, racing / Tim Belzer / December 22, 2024

A2RL admits that this is a hard problem, and that’s refreshing.

A2RL chose the Super Formula chassis to install its autonomous driving tech. Recently, an A2RL car went to Suzuka in Japan to try and race against a human-driven version. Credit: Roberto Baldwin

TOKYO—Racing is hard. It’s hard on the teams, it’s hard on the owner’s bank account, it’s hard on the cars, and it’s especially hard on the drivers. Driving at the edge for a few hours in a vehicle cockpit that’s only slightly wider than your frame can take a toll.

The A2RL (Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League) removes one of those elements from its vehicles but, in doing so, creates a whole new list of complexities. Say goodbye to the human driver and hello to 95 kilograms of computers and a whole suite of sensors. That setup was poised to be part of a demonstration “race” against former F1 driver Daniil Kvyat at Suzuka Circuit in Japan during the Super Formula season finale.

But again, racing is hard, and replacing humans doesn’t change that. The people who run and participate in A2RL are aware of this, and while many organizations have made it a sport of overselling AI, A2RL is up-front about the limitations of the current state of the technology. One example of the technology’s current shortcomings: The vehicles can’t swerve back and forth to warm up the tires.

A team of people stand in front of a racing car and pose for a photograph — The A2RL team and former F1 racer Daniil Kvyat (center) smile for the media at Suzuka. Credit: Roberto Baldwin

Giovanni Pau, Team Principal of TII Racing, stated during a press briefing regarding the AI system built for racing, “We don’t have human intuition. So basically, that is one of the main challenges to drive this type of car. It’s impossible today to do a correct grip estimation. A thing my friend Daniil (Kvyat) can do in a nanosecond.”

Technology Innovation Institute (TII) develops the hardware and software stack for all the vehicles. Hardware-wise, the eight teams receive the same technology. When it comes to software, the teams need to build out their own system on TII’s software stack to get the vehicles to navigate the tracks.

Not quite learning but not quite not learning

In April, four teams raced on the track in Abu Dhabi. As we’ve noted before, how the vehicles navigate the tracks and world around them isn’t actually AI. It’s programmed responses to an environment; these vehicles are not learning on their own. Frankly, most of what is called “AI” in the real world is also not AI.

Vehicles driven by the systems still need years of research to come close to the effectiveness of a human beyond the wheel. Kvyat has been working with A2RL since the beginning. In that time, the former F1 driver has been helping engineers understand how to bring the vehicle closer to their limit.

The speed continues to increase as the development progresses. Initially, the vehicles were three to five minutes slower than Kvyat around a lap; now, they are about eight seconds behind. That’s a lifetime in a real human-to-human race, but an impressive amount of development for vehicles with 90 kg of computer hardware crammed into the cockpit of a super formula car.

Currently, the vehicles are capable of recreating 90–95 percent of the speed of a human driver, according to Pau. Those capabilities are reduced when a human driver is also on the track, particularly for safety reasons. When asked by Ars what his biggest concern was being on the track with a vehicle that doesn’t have a human behind the wheel, Kvyat said he has to “try to follow the car first to see what line it chooses and to understand where it is safe to race it. Some places here [at Suzuka] are quite narrow—on the contrary from the Abu Dhabi track—and there are a lot of long corners. So I really need to be alert and give respect and space to the AI car,” Kvyat said.

Kvyat also noted that the AI car is traveling at a more respectable speed, so he really needs to know what’s going on.

The predictability of a human driver both on a track and in the real world is one of the issues surrounding AI. As we drive, walk, or bike around a city, we rely on eye contact from drivers, and there are certain behavioral expectations. It’s the behavioral outliers that cause issues. Examples include things like running a stop sign, weaving into a lane already occupied by another vehicle, or stopping in the middle of the road for no discernible reason. On the track, an autonomous vehicle might choose to deviate from the racing line around a corner because of a signal input that a human driver would ignore or fold into their driving based on their real-world experience. The context of the rest of a lived life is just as important as what’s learned on the track. Life and racing are hard and chaotic.

The “race”

On the Saturday of the race weekend, a demonstration of two A2RL vehicles raced around the circuit. The vehicles were moving quickly down the straight. The corners, though? We were told that they were still a bit tricky for the vehicles to navigate.

Down in the pits, the team watched a bank of monitors. Sensor data came in from the vehicles—zeros and ones representing the track translated into a sea of graphs. To help parse the data quickly, the system shows a green flag when everything is going well and red flags when the values are out of whack with what’s supposed to happen. In addition to how the vehicle is moving, information about fuel consumption, brake wear, and tire temperature is shared with the team.

All of this data lets the team know how hard it is pushing the vehicle. If everything looks good, the team can push the vehicle to go a little quicker, to push a little harder for a better lap time. Humans elsewhere in the pits will soon tell their human drivers the same thing. Push harder, be quicker; the car can handle it. The data coming in predicts what will happen in the next few seconds.

Hopefully.

The individual teams will try to find the optimal line, just like the human team, but it doesn’t always follow what humans have done before on a track. They work to create an optimal line for the autonomous car instead of just copying what humans are doing.

This team has been at Suzuka for weeks ahead of this race. The HD map they bought from a third party was off by meters. In that time the team had to remap the track for the vehicles and teach them how to drive on a circuit that’s narrower than the track at Abu Dhabi.

The car is outfitted with Sony 4K cameras, radars, lidar, high-definition GPS, and other sensors. The electric steering can handle up to five Gs. The hydraulic brakes on each wheel could be triggered individually, but currently, they are not, according to Pau. However, Pau did note that enabling this function would open up new possibilities, especially in cornering.

A pair of racing cars on the grid at Suzuka before the start of a race. Photographers and engineers are fussing over the car — On the grid at Suzuka. Credit: Roberto Baldwin

Pau took a moment while walking us around the vehicle to point to the laser that measures the external temperature of the tire. That, along with the ability to track the tire’s pressure, are key to ensuring the vehicle stays on the track.

The next morning, the main event was gearing up. Man versus machine. A modern-day John Henry tale without the drama of the song about a steel-driving man. We all knew Kvyat would win. A2RL was very up-front that the system is not nearly as quick as a human. At least not yet. But it had decided to bring the race to Japan, a country known to be on the cutting edge of technology. The “race” was to be held ahead of the season finale of the Super Formula season.

It was cooler that morning than the previous day. The cars were pushed out to the grid. Kvyat was stationed behind the driverless vehicle. The time between leaving the pits and the race starting felt longer than the day before. The tires were cooling off.

The A2RL vehicle took off approximately 22 seconds ahead of Kvyat, but the race ended before the practice lap was completed. Cameras missed the event, but the A2RL car lost traction and ended up tail-first into a wall. A rather anti-climatic end to weeks of work by the team. In the pits, people gathered around the monitors trying to determine exactly what went wrong.

Khurram Hassan, commercial director of A2RL, told Ars that the cold tires on the cold track caused a loss of traction. A press release sent out later in the day noted that one of the rear tires suddenly lost pressure, causing the vehicle to lose traction and slide into the wall.

The cameras missed the spin, but caught the aftermath. Roberto Baldwin

Hassan reminded us that the vehicle does not know how to swerve back and forth yet to warm up its tires. But more importantly, he said that the gap between simulation and the real world is very real. “You could do things on a computer screen, but this is so important. Because you have to be on the track,” Hassan said.

The reality is that reality is chaos and always changing. When a company notes that it’s doing millions of miles of simulated testing, it’s vital to remember that a computer-generated world does not equal the one we inhabit.

Reality and intelligence

A2RL doesn’t want to replace human-to-human racing. It understands the emotional attachment humans have to watching other humans compete. It also realizes that as these vehicles improve, what the teams learn will not be directly pulled from the track and put on self-driving cars. But by pushing these vehicles to the limit and letting AI determine the best course of action to keep from slamming into a wall or other vehicle, that information could be used in the future as a safety feature in vehicles—a way to keep a collision from happening used in conjunction with other safety features.

The day before the human versus AI race, Super Formula had its penultimate race of the season. During that race, two cars left the pits only to have one of their rear wheels come off. Also, another two cars collided with each another. Racing is hard, and accidents happen.

For A2RL, failure is always an option. It may break the hearts of everyone in the pits that have prepped for weeks for an event, but it’s important to remember that it’s a controlled environment. A2RL seems to understand and talks about the complications of aiming for an AI-powered vehicle. It would be nice if those companies testing on our streets did the same.

Human versus autonomous car race ends before it begins Read More »

Automakers excoriated by Senators for fighting right-to-repair

bmw, Cars, honda, Policy, right to repair, Stellantis, Subaru, Toyota / Tim Belzer / December 20, 2024

Yesterday, US Senators Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Joshua Hawley (R-MO) sent letters to the heads of Ford, General Motors, and Tesla, as well as the US heads of Honda, Hyundai, Nissan, Stellantis, Subaru, Toyota, and Volkswagen, excoriating them over their opposition to the right-to-repair movement.

“We need to hit the brakes on automakers stealing your data and undermining your right-to-repair,” said Senator Merkley in a statement to Ars. “Time and again, these billionaire corporations have a double standard when it comes to your privacy and security: claiming that sharing vehicle data with repair shops poses cybersecurity risks while selling consumer data themselves. Oregon has one of the strongest right-to-repair laws in the nation, and that’s why I’m working across the aisle to advance efforts nationwide that protect consumer rights.”

Most repairs aren’t at dealerships

The Senators point out that 70 percent of car parts and services currently come from independent outlets, which are seen as trustworthy and providing good value for money, “while nearly all dealerships receive the worst possible rating for price.”

OEMs and their tier-one suppliers restricting the supply of car parts to within their franchised dealership networks also slows down the entire repair process for owners as well as increasing the cost of getting one’s car fixed, the letter states.

As Ars noted recently, more than one in five automotive recalls are now fixed with software patches, and increasingly the right-to-repair fight has centered on things digital—access to diagnostics, firmware, and connected services. The percentage of non-hardware recall fixes will surely grow in the coming years as more and more automakers replace older models with software-defined vehicles.

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