> In the agreement, the automakers commit to giving independent car repair shops access to the data, tools, and information necessary to diagnose and repair veh

> In the agreement, the automakers commit to giving independent car repair shops access to the data, tools, and information necessary to diagnose and repair vehicles—the data, tools, and information provided to the automakers’ own dealership networks. I highly doubt they're giving that stuff to independent repair shops. Even if they are, providing the same tools and information to competitors isn't the same as having open standards. If the tooling only does course grained diagnostics and doesn't diagnose problems beyond complete assemblies, does that really improve anything for consumers? What about the training and information? If it all says that sub-assembly repair is impossible and unsupported, what does that do for me? It does nothing IMO. I think the best way to think about it is what I learned from watching some of Rossmann's YouTube videos. Until I saw him doing board level repair, I thought it was impossible because that's all I'd been taught. All of the manufacturers always said the same thing, "you need to replace the whole board." Now I realize that was a lie, so, IMHO, if you let the entrenched players of the industry dictate what everyone else gets for tooling, training, repair manuals, parts, etc., all you're going to get is the level of repairability they want, which is low, and not the level of repairability I want, which is high. > “Competition is alive and well in the auto repair industry,” the letter said. No it's not. If the current manufacturers control the supply of everything repair related, they'll price it so that independent repair shops can't out-compete the dealers. It'll be like Spotify trying to compete with Apple Music. There's an extra 30% margin in it for Apple no matter what (via the app store), so they always have better margin than Spotify no matter what.