>Then why even manufacture them and cripple them?
They cripple them because they know people want bigger tractor without emission control so they sell it as a less powerful tractor and then just expect people to break the law and turn the screw, and everybody is happy.
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>Thankfully, it's not illegal to own a screwdriver and nothing changes there. There's absolutely no relevance between right to repair (not right to break emission laws!) and the situation you describe.
There is because on the John Deere tractors you can't set the "screw" unless you have right to repair the engine system. John Deere has no screw because they're in the US and they're too afraid of US regulators.
I get what you are (trying) to say, but lets be real here. Right to repair people (myself included) just need to own that it will have some downsides.
Right to repair argues the tech should not be locked down, it doesn't argue you should be free to break the law.
You are also free to remove the handrails on a set of stairs using a simple wrench, but if a building inspector shows up or someone falls because of it there will likely be consequences. The argument here is that the simple wrench isn't the problem nor is your potential ability to remove handrails. In fact removing them may be necessary in some situations. The argument here is, you should be able to decide when it is necessary, while also facing consequences if tou do so in a way that is potentially harmful to others and the environment.
If you worry about the environmental impact of people turning a screw in a tractor you need heftier fines and more random unannounced controls. This is btw. how gun law works in countries where they make sense. Own a gun? No you don't unless you store it correctly and have documentation of ammunition spent etc.
So we will have right to repair but it's only legal if you document all repairs, keep records of parts ordered, only use verified vendors for those parts....etc etc. Right to repair laws shouldn't be onerous, and people should be able to (illegally) remove emissions controls, and we should recognize that as a bad thing that comes with the territory.
Don't freak out, things have downsides, it's actually admirable to be able to handle nuance, own it.
In the case of guns this documentation makes sense, because of what guns are used for typically.
It can be either, but be careful of the knock on effects. If you want to manage it via administrative controls now you may need a bureaucratic mechanism to regularly inspect vehicles. Generally, engineering controls are preferred over administrative controls.
1) Tractors are typically owned by low margin businesses (i.e. farmers) that need to be repaired in the field AND need to be repaired quickly, else you loose a crop. Adding complexity to tractors literally can cost the farm.
2) The actual emissions reduced is questionable. Tractors run significantly less than a truck, like 50-100x less often. Further there are at least 2x more trucks sold per year
3) To run the SCR system, the engine had to run hot for like 20 minutes burning extra fuel and required DEF (yet more input costs)
3) The emissions they are trying to reduce with the these are likely not excessively harmful from a tractor; largely because most tractors who need an SCR system is >75hp, which also means they're typically used on a large farm (100+ acres). Which dissipates the risks substantially.
For reference my 2022 Kubota tractor repeatedly had issues with the DPF / SCR system, mostly the software to enforce environmental rules. This lost us ~$20k one year due to the tractor being knocked out for a week (I was mid-cut for 140 acre hay, rained & rotted in the field post-cut).
For reference, I was very much ready to bypass the SCR system, but decided against it to keep the warranty. It had nothing to do about "right to repair", I figured out exactly how to bypass it.
That's infuriating. This kind of thing is why I specifically sought out a late '90s-early '00s Kubota, which has been great. Granted, I'm not doing anything commercial with it, and it hasn't been completely without issues. I had to make some compromises up front, I was initially looking for an L3710 DT but settled on an L3010 HST because the price was right and it was local. Added rear remote hydraulics last year, welded up some rust in the floor pan and repainted the bodywork. This year I will have to tear it all down again and split it to fix a hydraulic leak coming from the clutch housing (suspect front driveshaft seal). Still need to fabricate some brackets to hang the backhoe subframe. Need to put new ends on the tie rods because they're rattling like crazy. So it's not maintenance free, but the tradeoff I made is that there isn't anything on this machine that I cannot repair. Everything can be rebuilt, parts are available. In retrospect, would an older, simpler machine be a good tradeoff in your situation? So far I probably have 50hr/yr invested in tractor maintenance, but that includes some big ticket items so maybe over time that'll average out to ~10hr/yr. I could see how this might factor in the tradeoff.
It sounds like you are saying everyone is doing it today, so denying the right to repair doesn't affect the situation.
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>You pretty clearly said everyone is currently bypassing this, otherwise companies would not be putting in larger engines.
Everyone is doing it on the import tractors with the screws. They are not doing it with John Deere tractors, which are locked down for emission compliance. John Deere is handicapped by the fact they're located in the US and regulators have more leverage on them to prevent the sort of right-to-repair which would enable emission bypassing.
>Do what? What is not happening today that you think would happen if people were given the right to repair?
What is happening today is people with John Deere are not able to unlock their tractor for repair and turn the "screw" like they can with import tractors. The very first thing they will do once they can "repair" is delete emissions controls. That's a big part of what the farmers were pissed about and why they wanted right to repair, they couldn't "repair" their tractor to not use DPF, etc on their domestic tractors.
You pretty clearly said everyone is currently bypassing this, otherwise companies would not be putting in larger engines. Is that wrong?
What is happening today is that it's of greater difficulty to bypass emissions on repair-locked tractors like John Deere and very easy to do on tractors like mine (mostly imports).
>You pretty clearly said everyone is currently bypassing this, otherwise companies would not be putting in larger engines. Is that wrong?
"Everyone" is bypassing it on the repairable tractors. Once John Deere are repairable, they will do it on those too.
All of this to reduce "particulate" which is not the actual polluting part of diesel emissions, even though it is the part you can see. The polluting part is what you can't see.
The EPA changed its rules a year ago to allow measuring NOx emissions (which makes sense) instead of just measuring DEF consumption (which does not make much sense) before forcing an engine into "limp" mode, and in particular retrofitting a system to measure NOx and reflash the computer (including aftermarket solutions to do so) is no longer considered emissions tampering. This should have been done a long time ago.
I don't think VW and a few others trying to cheat the system to improve their bottom line makes it some kind of made up law that's supposed to be optics only and nothing in practice. It's just the typical corporate response to having to do something that's for the commons for once instead of tragedizing them.
Vendors’ compliance is not disputed, and you have produced no credible evidence of cheating. If there were demand for the smaller, more efficient engines that you’re fantasizing about, someone would already be building them with no legislative restrictions necessary. Under capitalism, any valid complaint can be rephrased as a business plan. You may not like how they complied with the law, but that’s a you problem. If you can’t bear to see it that way, then take it up with the inept authors of the restrictions. The purpose of a system is what it does.
Stating a broader principle in order to apply it to this instance, we in the U.S. are not obligated to go out of our way to pay more in taxes: “The legal right of a taxpayer to decrease the amount of what otherwise would be his taxes, or altogether avoid them, by means which the law permits, cannot be doubted” (Gregory v. Helvering, https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/293/465/). Similarly, the law requires manufacturers to meet the restrictions and does not require them to go out of their way to incur the enormous costs of design, certification, building and tooling up new factories, testing, hiring, training, etc., etc., etc. to produce entirely new engines. Anyone who seriously proposed such a rigamarole would have been accused of over-engineering or Rube Goldberging. Executives who put such a plan in place would have been sued and likely lost their jobs.
Intertemporal effects matter, but they are so frequently left out of what passes for economic analysis.
Are you able to read minds to know what someone else’s outlook is? Your interpretation cannot be the most charitable one. https://ethics.org.au/ethics-explainer-the-principle-of-char...
Maybe I'm missing your point, but the vendors non-compliance is documented fact in a court of law. Multiple individuals were indicted and the company itself pleaded guilty to multiple felonies (including fraud). Further, as with most collective action problems of this type, relying on individual choice to correct the problem all but ensures it won't be corrected. This is one area where the extreme libertarian mindset (which seems to be overrepresented on HN) tends to miss its mark.
Reality doesn't care what you're hoping to achieve with a system, the outcome won't change based on thoughts and ideas. Since reality tends to be fairly complicated, we usually won't design perfect systems on the first try - instead we have to analyze the outcome, and make changes to nudge the results into the direction we want.
But what if we don't do that? What if we stick with the initial approach even after we measure that the outcome doesn't align with our initial intentions, maybe even introduces unwanted side effects?
It would be fair to say "well, we tried our best" if nobody was able to have hidden intentions, but that's not the world we live in. People can be very, very happy about our systems not aligning with our intentions & introducing unwanted side effects because this misalignment advantages them in some way. These people can then block changes to the system to keep these advantages alive.
I believe a small fraction of decision makers is enough to keep most systems fixed in such a misaligned state, and we'd never do anything about it if we followed your logic.
In most situations disregarding intent is not useful for getting things done unless you have unilateral power to override intent.
A better explanation is that John Deere, like the massive truck corporations that make pickups, was happy to take advantage of blatant loopholes.
Of course the government exempts itself from this because they know all that bullshit of "it's just as reliable etc" is trickery. It's common to buy previously government owned deleted vehicles, because the people working in federal government don't want to eat the dogfood the plebs do, and AFAIK if you buy it from them then you're allowed to have it.
Generally though, you'd also want a police vehicle because of how well maintained fleet vehicles are in general, along with some added features and viewing the idle engine hours.
They laughed and let him go. Technically, he was legal.
Realistically, he was learning lies work. (He's now a perpetually homeless drug abuser with an increasing criminal record - before somebody jumps to cheer for his cleverness.)
Instead of selling tractors with more powerful, but limited motors, they should have sold tractors with less powerful motors and no screw. There is no need to do any of this in software. They were purposefully avoiding the regulation by telling farmers, "do not loosen that screw, or you'll break the law, wink-wink!"
> They were purposefully avoiding the regulation by telling farmers, "do not loosen that screw, or you'll break the law, wink-wink!"
They were? The whole point of John Deere locking down the firmware was to prevent this metaphorical loosening of the screw. It looks more like John Deere invested heavily in preventing modification of its hardware, much to the chagrin of farmers who wanted to cheat emissions.
It's more like: every engine has a metaphorical screw that can change the fuel mixture - this is inherent to combustion engines. John Deere made it really difficult or impossible to change that screw. Now farmers regained the ability to change that screw under the guise of repair.
In a word, no. You can probably squeeze a little more power out of a motor by remapping the control system but there's a limit. There's no amount of tuning that will make the 200hp motor in my Toyota develop 1,000hp.
Also this isn't really the point of right to repair. There's a lot more to this than farmers bypassing emission controls. The issue is when something breaks can you fix it before the window for planting or harvesting or fertilizing or whatever passes? John Deere wanted money for repairs but couldn't scale up the staff to actually deliver it on time and that scarcity made it prohibitively expensive. It also allows them to sell a new tractor by simply refusing to ever fix the perfectly good existing one.
When I worked in a custom harvest operation in the mid 2000s we were running 1970s John Deere combines. The nature of custom harvest is the customer hires you to harvest a field right now because it has to be dry enough to sell but there's rain coming and every day is another chance for it to all literally go up in smoke in a fire.
We bought a lot of John Deere parts from the local dealer but we also fabricated a lot of parts or modified them to do what we needed, especially when parts (understandably!) weren't available 30 years later. One example is modifying the suspension to handle 47 degree inclines. From the factory they could physically only do 12.5. Someone in Oregon built a conversion kit. It put a lot of extra stress on the machines so we had to do constant reinforcement and repair in the field. It would not have been economical to have a John Deere tech come out to the field and patch something up three times a week and they wouldn't have known how to fix a Hillco leveler anyway. This is what people mean when they say "right to repair". It includes the ability to modify for your purpose, and keep something going when support ends.
There was no "screw" for the commercial John Deere tractors with emissions controls, that I know of, as that was locked down to prevent "repair."
Anyone in the room care to volunteer?
Surely I can’t be understanding that correctly given your overall position.
So if that is really an issue, apply the correct fix and don't push the blame on environmentalists.
Risk mitigation (where the risk defined here is emissions outside some acceptable threshold) usually follow this hierarchy from most preferrable to least:
- remove the hazard (make it impossible for emissions to exceed the limit, even by altering the operation)
- install an engineering mitigation (filters, def, altered fuel mapping etc.)
- administrative mitigation (training, inspections)
- protective equipment (?? make everyone in society wear a mask?)
In this framework, a technological solution is preferrable to an administrative one.
i think everyone outside of the most hardcore greens will agree that consumer rights are more important than making emissions rules that are still in force harder to bypass.
Why should we set the AC to 80 or be diligent about turning off lights when billionaires are flying in a private jet to go watch a football game and datacenters are popping up like Starbucks?
How can anybody tell a farmer they should probably care more about emissions?
In some collective action problems, if everyone acts in their own individual self interest it results in worse outcomes for everyone. In those cases, it requires some central coordination.
It's good that people are catching up to this.
...which has a neat overlap with e.g. chat control and online age verification.
Opening up John Deere tractors for right to repair virtually assures they will ~all be doing emissions deletes. Part of their lock-down was profit seeking, but the other half is that different vendors had different ideas interpretations of the law about how locked down the system had to be to prevent emissions tampering, and domestic companies more subject to US law were generally far more paranoid about it.