BY RUSSELL TURNER
SCHOOL OF SHADE TREE MECHANICS
One of the greatest strengths that we humans have is the ability to improve upon the every day items that we use every day. Innovation has given us improvements on all sorts of inventions. Many times I have heard someone comment on some new tool or process; they would say, “That is so simple I can’t for the life of me understand why someone didn’t think of it earlier”. New ideas usually don’t happen on a scheduled timeframe, usually they happen because somebody will tinker with something and stumble upon a way to make it better. In 1998 a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed to reduce online piracy. Now some automakers want the government to expand the scope of this law.
The Auto Alliance, a special interest group representing 12 big automobile companies from Ford to Toyota, are lobbying hard to make working on the electrical and computer components of your own car illegal. They also argue that modern cars are so complex that working on advanced components could be dangerous. I agree that today’s autos are far more complicated that they used to be, but that should not be an excuse to expand a law to make it illegal to work on your own car. I have worked on my own autos for years and I have occasionally misdiagnosed the problem and purchased parts that I didn’t need, but I have found that even the professionals sometime make the same mistake.
Making mistakes is part of the curriculum in the school of hard knocks, but it can foster the ability to be self-sufficient. We Americans have accomplished great things because of our ability to improvise. This move trying to make it illegal to work on your own car reminds me of the policies of our government. The problems we are experiencing in our great nation can be traced back to government policies where our people are told that they cannot do certain tasks and to just let the government take care of it.
Our country was founded upon the idea of private property; when you buy something it is yours to do with as you wish. Sadly over time some American companies have begun to look at their products and their customers in a different way. I had read where the John Deere Company is trying to make the case that you don’t actually own the tractor you buy. You’re just given a license to use it for an extended period of time. In my opinion auto and equipment manufactures don’t need additional laws to prevent the owners from working on their own cars; they guarantee the new cars for a while and if the owner tampers with some components they run the risk of invalidating the warranty. After the warranty is expired don’t try to force the owner to use some factory-authorized entity to service their cars. We shade tree mechanics have done a pretty good job of keeping our cars on the roads in the past and we will in the future.
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