Every time you get behind the wheel, your car collects data about you. Where you’re going, how fast you drive, how hard you brake, and even how much you weigh.
All this data is generally not available to the vehicle owner. Instead, it is subject to secure restrictions that prevent anyone other than the manufacturer or authorized technicians from accessing the information. Automakers can use the same digital gates to prevent owners from making repairs or modifications, such as replacing their own brake pads, without paying extra for the manufacturer’s service.
The Repair Act, a bill being discussed at a subcommittee hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday, would require some of this collected data to be shared with vehicle owners, particularly items that would be helpful in making repairs.
“Automakers are trying to use the marketing advantage of having exclusive access to this data to get you to go to the dealership where they know what triggered this information,” says Nathan Proctor, senior director of the Right to Repair Campaign at PIRG. “Repair would actually be faster, cheaper and more convenient if this information was more widely disseminated, but it is not.”
Today, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce held a hearing titled (deep breath) “Examining Legislative Options to Strengthen Motor Vehicle Safety, Ensure Consumer Choice and Affordability, and Cement America’s Automotive Leadership.” The session focused on potential legislation to improve road safety, regulate autonomous vehicles and help people protect their catalytic converters from theft.
The hearing took on a contentious tone when discussion turned to the reparations law. The House bill, introduced in early 2025 by Reps. Neal Dunn of Florida and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, calls on automakers to give vehicle owners and third-party repair shops access to telemetry, or the ability to access all data collected by modern vehicles. The law was supported by organizations representing vehicle suppliers as well as auto service shops.
Bill Henvy, CEO of the Auto Care Association, which has long called for automakers to share vehicle owner data, testified at the hearing to say the threat to owner data has grown over the past decade.
“The need for a repair law is critical and real,” Hanvey said at the hearing, calling today’s vehicles essentially computers on wheels that produce data that manufacturers then block to prevent consumers from accessing it. “Make no mistake, car manufacturers unilaterally control the data, not the vehicle owner. It may be your car, but currently it’s the manufacturer’s data that gets to do what it wants.”
The repair law has been opposed by automakers and car dealers, who raise concerns about third-party use of their intellectual property. They say they’ve done enough to make their data and tools accessible and that if you need your car repaired, it’s not too difficult to find someone allowed to peek inside its digital brain.
“Vehicle owners should be able to get their vehicles repaired wherever they want,” Hilary Cain, senior vice president of policy for the automaker industry group Alliance for Automotive Innovation, said in testimony at the hearing. “The good news is that automakers already provide independent repairers with all the information, instructions, tools and codes needed to properly and safely repair a vehicle.”
Cain says that ultimately, automakers support a comprehensive federal right-to-repair law, even if it protects the company’s intellectual property and “does not require automakers to provide aftermarket parts manufacturers or auto parts retailers with data that is not necessary to diagnose or repair a vehicle.”
