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 oldest one in this fight: 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 safety claim has no evidence behind it. The people whose job is to find that evidence 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.

The regulators who went looking for the safety risk did not find it

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." When the FTC asked manufacturers to produce data showing that independent or do-it-yourself repair leads to more defects, more crashes, or more deaths, the manufacturers could not produce it.

The federal vehicle-safety regulator reached the same place, and its path there is worth tracing because it is the cleanest test of the cybersecurity version of Farley's claim. 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 is the high-water mark of the automakers' safety theory, and it 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. When the regulator whose job is safety says a thing is safe, a chief executive who says it is not should be asked to show his work.

Independent and do-it-yourself repair is the norm, not a fringe

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 have lost 12% of service visits to competition since 2018, a share that has been falling for years. 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 not a safety experiment. It 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.

The complexity and specialty-tools framing is a choice the industry makes

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 also not a fact of physics. It 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 carve-out is the whole game

Listen to where Farley drew his line. 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

The timing matters, and it is documented. Farley made his remark days after Ford and General Motors executives met President Trump at the White House on June 3, 2026. Trump described that meeting publicly the next day. According to reporting that originated with the Detroit Free Press, 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."

A company that was, the same week, asking the federal government to make consumer repair harder is not a neutral witness to whether consumer repair is safe. The "big advocate for the ability to repair a vehicle" and the executive lobbying to restrict it are the same man, in the same week.

What the evidence shows

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 a safety claim with no evidence behind it is not a safety claim. It is a marketing position wearing a safety claim's clothes, and the people who fix 70% of America's cars deserve to have it called what it is.

Louis Rossmann