A customer at Piedmont Tire and Auto in Virginia paid an extra $1,200 for a repair the shop could have finished in-house. John Filippone had the bay. The automaker would not release the software to complete the reprogramming. The car went to a dealership to get programmed, then came back. The owner paid the markup for a flash the local shop was not allowed to run.
That extra twelve hundred is what a locked diagnostic stream costs you. On May 21, the House Energy and Commerce Committee told the country it had advanced a fix. The vote was 48 to 1. Trade headlines treated the margin as a rout. Independent shops found a line they could live with. So did the automakers.
Whenever a committee advances a bill 48 to 1, you check who wrote the compromise. Dealer groups and the Alliance for Automotive Innovation do not hand you a $3.1 billion data lock and call it generosity. They gave up yesterday's cable under the dash so they could keep the wireless door on their own servers. I will not celebrate that vote.
The Graft on the Safety Bill
The original promise had a name: the REPAIR Act. Representative Neal Dunn carried it in the House with Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. Senators Ben Ray Lujan and Josh Hawley had a Senate companion. That bill required automakers to give independent shops and owners the same vehicle-generated data dealerships already have, including, on a connected car, the stream that travels over wireless technology through a telematics system.
Telematics is the cellular and Wi-Fi link built into a modern car. On a 2015 sedan, a technician still plugs a scanner into the OBD-II port under the dash. On a growing share of new vehicles, especially EVs, that same information travels wirelessly, and only the manufacturer controls who may open it on the other end.
If you take that car to the shop you already use, this is the wall. The bay can still see the port. The useful codes are already on a server the factory owns. Your technician can diagnose the mechanical job and still be unable to finish the flash that makes the car leave.
When the committee met in May, it did not send the REPAIR Act to the floor. Chairman Brett Guthrie grafted a narrower repair title onto H.R. 7389, the Motor Vehicle Modernization Act of 2026. That bill started in February as a 39-page overhaul of how NHTSA runs safety programs. Right to repair was not in the original text.
Inside the substitute, the wireless telematics mandate did not survive. In its place, the committee wrote in a January 15, 2014 memorandum of understanding for passenger vehicles under 14,000 pounds and an August 2015 agreement for heavy-duty trucks. The Federal Trade Commission would enforce those handshakes. The deals cover plug-in service tools and repair information. They do not open the wireless stream a connected car already sends home.
The committee just guaranteed the right to repair a car the way you could repair it a decade ago.
The Four-Year Parking Lot
The lobby groups saw the switch immediately. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation said the version that cleared committee was vastly different from the bills it had opposed. Its president, John Bozzella, wrote in support and urged lawmakers to consider making the language preempt state right-to-repair laws. If the old handshake becomes federal law, they can try to smother the states that already voted for a real one.
The National Automobile Dealers Association went further. It formally urged lawmakers to keep the narrower H.R. 7389 language and reject the broader REPAIR Act, arguing that third-party access to telematics would touch systems tied to brakes. That is the safety language they put on paper. The thing they want closed is the same wireless path that already tells the factory what your shop is not allowed to see.
Follow the volume if you want the motive. Over the past eight years, the share of vehicle repairs handled at franchised dealerships slipped from 33 percent to 29 percent. Every diagnostic step a dealer still controls is a repair that does not leak to the independent market. The Auto Care Association puts the cost of data-access limits at $3.1 billion a year. In its survey, 51 percent of independent shops said they send up to five vehicles a month to a dealer because they cannot finish the job.
That is your car in that count. You drop it at the shop you trust, and they can still do the mechanical work, then send you down the road for a flash only the dealer is allowed to run.
Instead of opening that stream, Section 204 of the substitute sent wireless telematics to an FTC study. The commission has four years after enactment to report to Congress. The dealers' own brief puts that report in 2030.
Representative Neal Dunn named the hole in the room. The most glaring missing piece, he said, is wirelessly transmitted data, telematics. He called the package a watered-down version derailed by parties that stand to gain. When the final roll call came, Dunn did not vote. Representative Lori Trahan reminded the committee that Massachusetts voters passed a real right-to-repair law with 75 percent of the vote, then she voted yes anyway. Only Representative Jake Auchincloss voted no.
The Port That Isn't There
If you own the car, you are supposed to choose the shop. That is what the 48-1 vote is selling. You hear right to repair and you picture the bay down the street finishing the job you already paid for.
The shop can still plug into the port. On a growing share of cars that port is already a ghost. The diagnostic data now lives on a server the manufacturer controls, reachable only through a wireless link the manufacturer built. A right that stops at the cable under the dash is the right to fix last decade's car.
H.R. 7389 is expected to hitch a ride on the surface transportation bill, and current transportation funding expires September 30, so lawmakers will have a deadline and a 48-1 clip to wave. If that package moves as written, the federal right they hand you is the 2014 plug-in handshake, now enforceable by the FTC, with wireless telematics sitting in a four-year study, which leaves you able to take last decade's car to the shop down the street while the next one you buy keeps sending its diagnostics through a door you do not hold.
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