You know, all that data they were hoping to make money on.
I'm not familiar with Massachusetts politics. It's a game of chicken between Boston and the NHTSA (or Congress), not the automakers--they have to comply with the law.
At which point people are going to notice, and ask why, and when they learn the answer is that the NHTSA is captured by automakers, maybe the NHTSA would like to avoid this hit to their reputation more than the commonwealth of Massachusetts would like to avoid looking like it's standing up to Big Auto.
Massachussetts would be banning the registration of new cars. Manufacturers wouldn't have a choice because they can't comply with the Massachussetts law. Maybe consumers who don't want to register their cars will still buy, I don't know.
It's a high-stakes gamble at pressuring the NHTSA. There are likely better ways to do that than shutting down the state's car business.
You know perfectly well that hardly anybody is going to do that.
> There are likely better ways to do that than shutting down the state's car business.
Like what? You have to do something that gets people to notice enough to put pressure on the captured regulators.
Which is why I said "Massachussetts would be banning the registration of new cars."
> Like what?
In the short term, their AG can sue under the Administrative Procedure Act. SCOTUS is re-working Chevron, and this case might thread the needle.
In the medium term, they could angle for DoT intervention. This would probably require coordination between their Senators and other like-minded states'. In the long term, the Congress must pass legislation that, if not granting a right to repair, at least explicitly enables it.
In summary, someone has to commit to making this one of the half dozen or so things one gets to do in office. I'm unconvinced Massachussetts voters would reward that.
Get the state's Congressional delegation to introduce a law that would explicitly protect state right to repair laws, taking it out of the regulators hands, moving the debate about cybersecurity claims vs right-to-repair to a different and more visible venue.
Obviously, the State gov can't compel that, but if the right-to-repair rule is sufficiently popular with the state electorate, it should be easy to convince the State's representatives in Congress to push on the matter.
Something can be popular (in the sense that a significant majority are in favor) without having enough interest or organization behind it to cause federal representatives to care. Moreover, Massachusetts is about 2% of the federal legislature. Even if their citizens and representatives care about it a lot, they may not have the votes to do anything at the federal level.
Whereas if they refuse to be cowed, it costs the automakers something. Maybe they'd like to be able to sell cars more than they'd like to be able to lock third party mechanics out of them, and stop pressuring federal regulators to keep doing what causes them to be prohibited from it.
“ Subaru and another automaker, Kia, have been especially aggressive in resisting the law. While other companies are counting on a long-running federal lawsuit to overturn the statute, Kia and Subaru opted to shut off the features in their vehicles that are covered by the law.”
For it to work, I'm guessing that additional states would need to join Massachusetts.
Unfortunately, as we've seen with New York, that would probably be opposed by significant back-room sleaze.
Not if manufacturers are federally prohibited from complying with the requirements of your registration conditions; there won’t be anything qualified for you to register.
I would, but the US Supreme Court in Gonzalez v. Raich, 545 U.S. 1 (2005) already did; the current state of nonenforcement of federal prohibition agaimst state-authorized use isn't from a Constitutional limit due to the interstate commerce clause, but from a federal law adopted by Congress, specifically, an appropriations rider adopted in each spending bill since 2014 prohibiting DoJ from spending funds to enforce federal marijuana laws against certain acts whetr authorized by state law.
That is a pretty convoluted process to do not enforce a law.
> The NHTSA said a malicious actor "could utilize such open access to remotely command vehicles to operate dangerously, including attacking multiple vehicles concurrently."
Yet, the Mass law is looking for...
> allow independent repair shops to access diagnostic data that newer cars can send directly to dealers and manufacturers to allow consumers to seek repairs outside dealerships.
It sounds like the same access to get data on the vehicles also allows control. For auto companies to comply with both laws could be possible but that it would require more fine grained access controls.
Or, am I missing something?
Right now they have a system where automakers granted themselves a dangerous and unreasonable level of remote access to cars that aren't theirs. Now they're claiming that it would be dangerous and unreasonable for third parties to have that level of remote access to cars that aren't theirs.
No kidding.
But you could easily have a system where a remote access server has to be authorized by the owner, e.g. by having to press a button inside the car while the key is present. And could be revoked by the owner in the same way. Then the car could be repaired by anyone... who is inside the car and has the key. Which is not only completely reasonable, it's more reasonable than the thing they're doing now.
Some car manufacturers have also attempted to use encryption and implemented it so poorly that it was easily cracked.
There is no technical reason that a car key can't effectively be a yubikey. The computer issues a challenge to the key, answering the challenge requires a secret stored in the key, so you need the key. It works as long as the encryption isn't broken.
And if "car can be remotely controlled" and the encryption is broken then that's a much bigger problem than anything your local mechanic is doing.
This is how most modern “smart key” systems work.
Trivially? No.
It's not trivial to (re)design the bus system to allow open access while also implementing proper security to prevent malicious access. The only people calling this regulatory capture are the ones that don't know anything about the difficulties of programming to hardware, especially when you can't just patch out the bugs with a trivial OTA update.
Really seems like a lot of fuss about stuff that has plenty of possible options. I might even call it FUD or a miscommunication it's so sloppy.
Personally, I don't want a car sending data to anyone. I disconnected OnStar in the one vehicle that had it. Pretty simple to remove the bridge between the cell board and the rest of the electronics.
The problem is the timeframe. The law was passed by voters in Nov 2020, and already took effect. For a minor part (like headlights) or something that can be swapped out, not a big deal. But we're talking about the underlying system that runs the car, which has been built up over decades and which both automakers and parts suppliers rely on. That's not something you just change overnight without careful design and testing.
Then, even with federal preemption, the auto manufacturers would be forced to comply.