User:Louis/Jim Farley's right to repair safety claim

On June 8, 2026, days after Ford executives met the Trump administration at the White House, a Detroit Free Press reporter asked Ford chief executive Jim Farley whether Ford wants people repairing their own vehicles. He said no, and he gave a reason: doing the work yourself on a modern Ford could get someone killed.

Asked about right to repair at a Ford and Bloomberg Philanthropies event in Detroit, Farley first laid out Ford's stated position.

I think Ford's position is very reasonable. We're really a big advocate for the ability to repair a vehicle, but it has to be done at a reasonable cost, and...

The reporter pressed: But you don't want people repairing their own vehicles? Farley answered:

No, that's, that's fine, not for warranty work, though. These are very complicated cars, and we don't think that's safe, for many of the repairs on our vehicles, someone at home like myself could never do it. I have no problem working on a '73 Bronco, but to work on a brand-new Bronco? I need all sorts of specialty tools. That's something that, um, you know, we would put people's lives at risk.

I have spent my working life repairing electronics that the manufacturer said could not safely be repaired by anyone outside its network. The pattern in Farley's answer is the same one the FTC documented in 2021: name a real danger, attach it to independent repair without any data tying the two together, and present a business preference as a safety rule. The people whose job is to find evidence for that danger looked for it and did not find it. And the thing Farley calls dangerous is what tens of millions of vehicles already get, every day, from shops and owners who are not Ford dealers.

FTC and NHTSA findings on the safety justification

The Federal Trade Commission studied the exact justification Farley used. After a public workshop and thousands of pages of industry comment, its 2021 report to Congress, Nixing the Fix, concluded that there is scant evidence to support manufacturers' justifications for repair restrictions. The report addressed the safety justification directly. The Commission wrote that it had specifically asked manufacturers for data on the risks of repairs made by consumers or independent shops, and that the industry did not supply it:

...other than citing to the mobile phone thermal runaway occurring in Australia in 2011, manufacturers provided no data to support their argument that injuries are tied to repairs performed by consumers or independent repair shops. This is so despite the fact that the Call for Empirical Research specifically asked for data concerning '[t]he risks posed by repairs made by consumers or independent repair shops'...

The federal vehicle-safety regulator reached the same place. On June 13, 2023, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration wrote to vehicle manufacturers warning that opening up telematics could be dangerous.

Open access to vehicle manufacturers' telematics offerings with the ability to remotely send commands allows for manipulation of systems on a vehicle, including safety-critical functions such as steering, acceleration, or braking...

That letter lasted about ten weeks. On August 22, 2023, the same agency, through the same assistant chief counsel, wrote to the Massachusetts Attorney General's office and reversed course.

NHTSA strongly supports the right to repair. We are pleased to have worked with you to identify a way that the Massachusetts Data Access Law may be successfully implemented ... without compromising safety.

The agency pointed to short-range wireless protocols such as Bluetooth as a compliant, safe way to give owners and independents access. So the one federal body with authority over vehicle safety looked at the precise scenario Farley invokes and concluded that repair access and safety are compatible.

Scale of independent and owner repair in the U.S.

Highlighted excerpt from Cox Automotive's 2025 Service Industry Study on dealership service-visit decline.

Farley framed self-repair as something exotic, a thing only a few people would attempt. The market says the opposite. A 2025 Cox Automotive study found that dealerships are losing service customers to independent shops, quick-oil-change outlets, and mobile services. In the study's words, Dealerships handle 12% fewer service visits than they did in 2018. The same study measured how often owners of newer cars return to the selling dealer:

In 2025, only 54% of people with cars two years old or newer went back to the dealership where they purchased for service, which is down from 72% in 2023.

The large majority of service happens somewhere other than a dealer. Independent shops perform about 70% of post-warranty repairs, and roughly 292 million vehicles are in operation in the United States, most of them serviced outside dealer networks. The U.S. light-vehicle aftermarket was projected to reach $435 billion in 2025.

A sector that large, servicing a fleet that big, is how Americans keep their cars on the road. If independent and owner repair were the menace Farley describes, the bodies would be everywhere by now, and the FTC and NHTSA would have the data. They do not.

Specialty tools, the 2014 MOU, and what the industry agreed to provide

Farley's strongest-sounding move is the Bronco contrast: a 1973 Bronco he can fix, a brand-new Bronco he says he could not, because it needs all sorts of specialty tools. The example works against him. The 2026 Bronco is a ladder-frame, gas-engine truck, which the journalist who transcribed his remark called one of the most primitive new cars you can buy right now. If the conventional truck is the example of impossible complexity, the argument is in trouble before it starts.

The specialty-tools point is a business decision, and the industry has already promised to undo it. In a 2014 national memorandum of understanding, automakers agreed to make available for purchase by owners and independent repair facilities all diagnostic repair tools incorporating the same diagnostic, repair and wireless capabilities that they make available to their own dealers, for Model Year 2002 vehicles and thereafter. When the same tools are available to everyone, someone at home like myself could never do it stops being a description of modern cars and becomes a description of what the manufacturer chooses to withhold.

The warranty-period carve-out and the REPAIR Act

Farley drew his line at warranty work. He said self-repair is fine, not for warranty work, though. That carve-out is the federal fight in one phrase. The point of withholding tools and data during the warranty period is to keep the owner inside the dealer channel for the years when the car needs the most service. That is the pressure the federal REPAIR Act is written to relieve, by requiring access to the data, parts, and tools an owner or independent shop needs. The current version, H.R. 1566 in the 119th Congress, was introduced February 25, 2025 and was forwarded by subcommittee to the full Energy and Commerce Committee by voice vote on February 10, 2026. The bill is alive. The carve-out Farley defended is exactly what it targets.

Telematics data, parts revenue, and the service channel

Strip the safety language away and the dispute is about who gets paid to fix the car and who controls the data the car generates. This is the same business model that locks consumers into a single repair channel in every industry where it appears, and the automakers have fought to keep it in the most direct way possible: at the ballot box and in court, where the safety theory loses.

Massachusetts voters mandated repair access twice by direct ballot. In 2012 they passed an automotive right-to-repair question by 2,353,603 to 392,562. In 2020 they passed the Data Access Law, extending the right to telematics data, by 2,599,182 to 867,674. The automakers' trade group, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, sued to block the 2020 law on safety and cybersecurity grounds. They lost. Judge Denise J. Casper of the federal district court in Massachusetts upheld the law on February 11, 2025, and the Alliance's appeal to the First Circuit, filed March 14, 2025, remains pending as of June 2026. The safety argument Farley repeated on camera is the same argument his own industry's lawyers already brought to a federal judge and could not win.

The industry's alternative to laws like this is a voluntary commitment it can write and walk back at will. In July 2023 the automakers and two repair-trade groups announced a national telematics agreement and held it up as proof that legislation was unnecessary. The Auto Care Association, which represents the independent repair sector, called it a thinly veiled response by the automotive OEMs to the REPAIR Act, and pointed out that a non-binding pledge with no enforcement mechanism is not a substitute for a law. The pattern is the same one consumers see with software locks across other industries: control the access, then describe the control as protection.

Days before the interview, the automakers asked Washington to restrict repair

Farley made his remark days after Ford and General Motors executives met President Trump at the White House on June 3, 2026. The meeting included General Motors chief executive Mary Barra, Ford Blue and Model e president Andrew Frick, representatives of the National Automobile Dealers Association and the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, and Republican Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio, a former dealership owner. Ford confirmed that Frick attended the meeting to discuss vehicle repair and declined to comment further.

Trump described that meeting publicly the next day, and the Detroit Free Press broke the story on June 4, 2026 under the headline Trump says Ford, GM want bill to restrict owners from fixing their own vehicles. According to that reporting, he said the automakers had asked him to help restrict consumers from fixing their own vehicles.

They don't want people to fix their car ... I said, that's strange. I'd never heard of that.

What the automakers brought to Washington was narrower than basic mechanical repair. Their objections centered on access to software, telematics systems, and connected-vehicle data. The industry backed a competing bill, the Motor Vehicle Modernization Act of 2026 (H.R. 7389), as an alternative to the REPAIR Act. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation pushed back on Trump's framing, saying the industry already supports repair access:

As we testified before the committee in January, independent auto repairers, collision repair experts, and leading automakers all support the right to repair. Always have, always will. ... Those same independent repairers and collision experts will tell you they have no problem getting exactly what they need to properly and safely repair a vehicle.

The big advocate for the ability to repair a vehicle was, the same week, asking the federal government to restrict it.

What the FTC, NHTSA, and the court found

Farley's claim is not supported by the safety regulator, by the trade regulator, by any data either of them could find, or by the federal judge who heard the industry's version of it. What supports it is a service-revenue model that depends on keeping owners and independent shops out of the warranty channel and away from the car's data. Saying we would put people's lives at risk is the most effective way to defend that model, because no one wants to argue against safety. But the safety claim has no evidence behind it, and the people who fix 70% of America's cars deserve to have it called what it is.

Louis Rossmann