Massachusetts holds hearing on Right to Repair

Tire Business staff report
 
BOSTON (Sept. 18, 2009) -- Advocates and opponents of the Motor Vehicle Owners’ Right to Repair Act lined up in force Sept. 15 to testify on the legislation before the Massachusetts Legislature’s Joint Committee on Consumer Protection and Professional Licensure.

The Right to Repair Act would require auto makers, on pain of criminal sanctions, to make available to independent auto repairers the same repair and diagnostic information they provide their franchised dealers.

In a press release, the Automotive Service Association (ASA) described how the ASA delegation—led by ASA President Ron Pyle, ASA board member Donny Seyfer and Massachusetts ASA member Rusty Savignac—told the committee that Right to Repair legislation is unnecessary.

The National Automotive Service Task Force (NASTF), a voluntary organization created by an agreement between the ASA and the auto makers in 2002, already does a more than adequate job of policing efforts to provide information and field independent repairers’ complaints, the ASA contingent said. The association quoted Mr. Savignac as calling the Right to Repair Act “legalized theft of intellectual property rights disguised as an unnecessary solution to a perceived problem.”

Groups such as the New England Tire Dealers Association, the Massachusetts Auto Body Association and the Massachusetts Independent Auto Dealers Association testified in favor of the Right to Repair Act at the hearing, according to Stan Morin, general manager of New England Tire in Attleboro, Mass.

According to Mr. Morin, most of the people who testified against the bill—with Mr. Savignac an exception—came from outside Massachusetts.

“I’m an ASA member, but those people don’t speak for me,” he said. “How can someone from Colorado come to your town and tell you what you should be doing?”

NASTF, he added, is “an incomplete work of art” that lacks the authority to enforce the rights of independent repairers to the repair and diagnostic information they need to survive.

Mr. Morin said he expects the committee to vote on the bill before the Columbus Day recess.

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