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It's amazing how you can be so completely incorrect on so many points it's as if you have never been part of the Auto industry or the auto service industry in t
by elmerfud 5y ago
It's amazing how you can be so completely incorrect on so many points it's as if you have never been part of the Auto industry or the auto service industry in the United States.
The FTC in conjunction with the NHTSB does mandate these things. Making parts available is not necessarily making manufacturing specifications for the part available and I never said such a thing, but anyone can purchase the part reverse engineer it and construct a replica part and nothing can be done about it that is what fosters the third parties to make imitation parts.
Complete parts lists for a car are considered a part that must be made available. Factory assembly manuals and factory repair manuals again are considered parts that must be made available. Additionally specialized and customized tools that are noted as requirements in the assembly manuals are also considered parts for that vehicle. The actual implementation of the requirement is very broad in its scope because again it's been challenged and they've been forced to do it not out of their goodwill but because they had to. Again settled law 50 years in the past.
Well you are correct that they can set the price for the parts to any exorbitant amount that they want they cannot onerously limit the supply chain channels that their parts get sold through. Nor can they provide different pricing to different suppliers of parts. So this means they can take a $1 part and suggest the retail price is $2,000 but what they cannot do is tell their dealerships or their supply distribution places that they must sell the part for $2,000 when they sell it to someone off of the street but only source it internally for $1 for warranty repair or when they are doing the repair themselves. This is why things such as parts lists and factory assembly and repair manuals are available as parts. Because the dealership is not just given this information as if it's proprietary secret information from the manufacturer the dealership is a third party entity therefore they buy the factory assembly manuals the specialized tools noted in the factory assembly manuals etc. And if they can buy the parts those parts need to be made available for sale hence the mom and pop repair shop down the street who is not an authorized repair shop can still go by the exact same tools and the exact same factory repair manual. Even having your car repaired by the Mom and Pop shop doesn't exclude future warranty work by the factory unless they can show the Mom and Pop shop did something incorrectly. But the onus is on the manufacturer or their representative as the dealer who's coordinating the warranty work to show previous work was done incorrectly to cause the issue. Completely the opposite of Tesla remotely disabling vehicles and then refusing to re-enable them without paying them.
Dealerships for the major auto manufacturers has become that supply chain channel because dealerships are third parties and only have a dealership sales relationship with the manufacturer they are not directly owned by the manufacturer. The manufacturer has specific rules and guidelines setting up who can become a dealership and areas and so forth and these are also very well regulated through state laws therefore there is always a wide variety of ways to get parts. This also ensures competition especially around parts so that not everyone would charge an idiotically high suggested retail price.
Tesla flies in the face of all of this and you can be a Tesla apologist and believe that this is even a poor system of car manufacturers not being able to sell directly to consumers like Tesla wants to do. That is a completely different set of discussions. Because all of these things are interwoven top to bottom when dealing with auto manufacturer and sale and they cannot be separated but Tesla is blatantly ignoring all of it. And people are completely fine with their selective deconstruction without understanding that all of it needs to be revamped to protect the consumer. Which circles back to the original comments for the original post of this is really too little too late and there is no teeth behind it. The FTC is merely giving a lip service without actually helping anything or preventing the ongoing continual abuses there are today.