The right to repair died once magic computers came into the world. Before that trying to tell anyone their mechanical / electrical systems were undocumented proprietary and warranty breaking if you tried to repair them would have caused a riot. But since computers were sufficiently magical that a critical enough mass of people wrote off trying to understand them, the industry and all resulting industries undermined the right to actually own anything related to them.
Don't forget John Deere tractors!
I think there are as many or more car hackers than ever - CAN bus opened car hacking from the world of the gear head to the world of the computer geek.
I so strongly disagree with this assumption. We got a nascent not even close to open source scene on x86 and a few hobbyist tweak boards. They still use proprietary hardware, the firmware is still almost always proprietary, the drivers are often proprietary, and for general users 99% of their OSes are proprietary.
And the consequences of that world that doesn't care about right to repair or software freedoms or having control of computers impacts me. I can't get an x86 pc now without a hardware backdoor, I can't use 802.11an wifi without proprietary code, I can't display visuals to a screen without proprietary code. The screen itself is running a ton of proprietary code. My hard drive has a computer in it and thats wholly proprietary.
And that was in an ecosystem where moddability was handed to us on a silver platter with ACPI which only existed for IBM and Microsofts sake, not for anyone elses. It was not a charity. That is why we still have no mobile platforms that use a standard hardware abstraction layer that you can run a generic OS on.
The Internet of Things never developed an open source ecosystem. SmartTVs never developed an open source ecosystem. Set top boxes and consoles never devleoped an open source ecosystem. Cars almost certainly will never develop an even remotely functional open source ecosystem - companies will use open source code, because someone else did the work for them and they can save money. They won't contribute back, they won't respect their users, and they won't respect the developers that put in thousands of hours of free labor by sponsoring them. That isn't open source winning, that is corporate profits winning.
Look at John Deere. That is where we are going. This is not going to be a simple matter of find the ethernet jack, telnet into a shell, and start running code. This is signed payloads, read only rom, and no way to access the firmware.
If there is an open source car ecosystem, it will be like the open source phone OS world. A joke, that cannot practically run on anything, that at best is ripping half of the Android equivalent out of itself to even run. And I guarantee Ford et al will never be as philanthropic as Google was in open sourcing Android to release their car OSes middleware like that.
You can't 'throw hackers' at something like that.
The car manufacturers have all of the control, and in a sense, it is black magic.
This is exactly the type of attitude that leads to the proliferation of vulnerabilities on the web.
"It's not like we're using it to fly planes, so who cares if we're not checking every SQL statement for injection vulnerability"
Then the code gets used on some ecommerce site, the site inevitably gets hacked, and customers' PII gets leaked.
A similar argument exists for why DIY battery banks are not ideal. It's not inconceivable that some dedicated hobbyist engineer pulls it off in a safe way. But how would you feel if you were over in your neighbors garage and noticed he had haphazardly wired 600 18650 cells together based on a design he found on the internet?