Posted by bilsbie 3 hours ago
For automobiles, this has been the case - that the owner is responsible the vehicle goes out of spec... and the owner can also do a lot of customization of their vehicle.
For heavy machinery (which tractors fall into), the manufacture is almost always on the hook for any modification that the owner makes.
https://www.farm-equipment.com/articles/18110-what-you-need-...
> Here’s one real-life scenario that Natalie Higgins, vice president of government relations and general counsel for EDA, shared during a recent presentation for the United Equipment Dealers Assn. “An Ohio equipment owner purchased a tractor and then installed a turbocharger on the engine. The tractor owner sustained injuries and then sued both the manufacturer and the equipment dealer, alleging that his injuries were the result of negligence on the part of the manufacturer and dealer. Remember, neither the dealer nor the manufacturer were involved in the turbochargers installation.”
> ...
> And, if you service equipment that has been chipped, the warranty will most likely be denied and you will not be paid for your work. “That can also put your dealership in a sticky situation if technicians in the shop are not conveying to the rest of the dealership what is going in,” says Wareham. F
> Financial consequences can be harsh for not following the law. Under federal law 40 CFR § 89.1006, the penalty for a dealer who removes or renders inoperative emissions controls is subject to a penalty of $32,500 for each violation. Wareham says that one manufacturer of chipping software was initially fined $300,000 by the EPA and then $6 million to ensure future compliance with the Clean Air Act. “The EPA has stated that their intent is to crack down on defeat devices in 2020,” says Wareham.
> A dealer may face liability issues when customers tamper with the equipment they purchased, even if a dealer had nothing to do with the modification. For example, in instances in Ohio and Oregon, customers were injured as a result of modifications and dealers were sued.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-ohnd-1_12-cv-01...
Note that part of this is also that worker's comp excludes farm labor. So you can't get compensated through workers comp.
https://nationalaglawcenter.org/workers-compensation-for-agr...
> Whether or not someone is eligible for workers’ compensation depends on their state and the industry they work in. There are no requirements at the federal level that mandate states to have workers’ compensation laws. Nevertheless, every state, except for Texas, requires most employers to carry workers’ compensation insurance. However, the majority of state workers’ compensation laws specifically exclude or limit agricultural employers from the workers’ compensation requirement.
Product Liability in the Farm Equipment Industry - https://youtu.be/NdN577BbnSY
Take note of 42:23 where it goes to who is at fault and the liability for it (the case study starts at 21:21 - jumping to 42:23 you can get the "who is paying for it" in two minutes). The entire video is interesting (if you're interested in product liability for industrial (farm) equipment ... but I can understand someone not wanting to watch an hour long video about it). It boils down to "every piece of farm equipment is dangerous from the insurance perspective and a manufacture allowing unapproved modifications to the equipment is still at fault, even if the modification was made by another party."
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This is such a weasley disingenuous argument. First of all, it was a guy's insurance company that sued the tractor manufacturer and the supercharger manufacturer. The guy filed an insurance claim, the insurance company is just suing anyone they can possibly imagine to try to make the quarterly results better.
It was also dismissed under summary judgement because the case is ridiculous on it's face. This was not a case where restricting the right to modify things you own based on possible harm to a corporation was justified.
Quite the opposite, this is a case where a greedy insurance company made a really stupid hail-mary lawsuit to try and recover from a legitimate insurance claim.
The fact that we're repeating this blatant corporate propaganda is frankly embarrassing.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-ohnd-1_12-cv-01...
The way this is framed, it doesn't even sound like the goal is to affect this dynamic at all. Rather it's to create a loophole of "temporarily" bypassing emission systems, such that if you delete and get caught you can just pinky swear that it's temporary for a repair that you're about to complete real soon. So the only real goal seems to be implicitly rolling back emissions enforcement across the board.
Actual right to repair action would focus on making it so individuals are able to self-repair the emissions control systems to function as designed. So this really just seems like yet another instance of a lofty idea being abused as cover for the destructionist agenda.
As a result, only corporations remain or the few remaining owner operators avoid any engine newer than the year ~2000. These older vehicles also have the added benefit of having minimal electronics, sensors, and ECMs.
She’s actually pretty cogent for 90 years old.
She does watch too much CNN though, winds her up a fair bit. Though at that age, your world tends to shrink so at least it gives her something to do.
I think this is a good policy direction. I don't like the rhetoric and I understand that this as much a political decision as anything else, but I'm glad to see it regardless. A year from now if someone says "you reflexively oppose anything Trump's administration does," I'll have this to look back on.
(Shoes at TSA checkpoints too, btw.)
The following sentence admittedly muddies it a bit, but in general the suggestion that John Deere can still be the arbiter for when the machine can / cannot run without the environmental system in the loop seems like a significantly less meaningful change than what is described on the EPA.gov website.
[0] https://dis.epa.gov/otaqpub/display_file.jsp?docid=64859&fla... -- It's only 3 pages, very quick read
> Boston, MA – U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote to Deere & Company (John Deere) accusing the company of undermining its own “right-to-repair” agreements and evading its responsibilities under the Clean Air Act by failing to grant its customers the right to repair their own agricultural equipment.
AUGUST 16, 2023 - The EPA finally refutes John Deere, dealership arguments against Right to Repair https://pirg.org/articles/the-epa-finally-refutes-john-deere...
> On August 4, after prodding for more than a year by PIRG and our allies, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sent an on-the-record letter to the National Farmers Union in support of Right to Repair. The letter clearly refutes manufacturers’ and dealers’ accusations that repair access facilitates emissions tampering and therefore violates environmental laws.
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Note that this started in the previous administration and the EPA was chastising John Deer three years ago on this issue.
The end result? You can't do anything to a modern car without going to a manufacturer and using their locked-in ecosystem entirely. They have been caught doing every trick they were told not to do and they get away with it.
It's simply easier for them to take all the extra profit they're getting and deflect lawsuits. From an American standpoint, that means the manufacturers are getting too much out of the deal and the only way to fix that is to make the lawsuits more painful. Because it's not like it's manufacturers vs. the public - it's really the manufacturers vs. third-party repairers AND the public.
There's also a standard for the dongles (which specifies a DLL export interface from a driver, amusingly) called J2534 so you don't need a separate hardware interface for each make, although to your point, the way the laws around J2534 were written was too lax and some manufacturers have realized that there is a loophole where only certain diagnostic tasks like module reflashing need to be possible over J2534.
Also worth noting that reverse engineered software has generally not been majorly threatened by manufacturers in the automotive space; Forscan for Ford, VCDS and OBD11 for VW, and so on are all quite popular.
Unfortunately "security" restrictions especially in the EU and the uprise of ADAS systems has made things a lot harder; most makes now have some online challenge/response cryptography (ie VW SFD) for diagnostics where previously they had offline login, and most ADAS and camera systems require extremely expensive calibration jigs (this is a valid technical problem, but with no incentive to reduce cost or make these systems accessible, they end up being comically expensive).
Anyway the situation in automotive is way better than the situation in equipment and ag, so I don't think it's entirely fair to say that regulation was a complete failure.
One of the worst Trump-isms that will out-live him is how normalized name-calling has become, even in US agency press briefings. Just childish and shameful.
Huh, interesting framing here. Did some clever Right to Repair advocate figure out that they could get pro-consumer action through by phrasing it as anti-Clean Air Act?
I'm not too hopeful for this shift surviving contact with John Deere's counter-advocacy though. Remember the flip-flopping on sending ICE after farmhands and hotel/casino staff? That ultimately seems have landed on the maximalist deport-them-all stance on account of Miller's proximity to Trump's ear. I doubt there's someone with personal stakes so close to power advocating for Right to Repair, so the lobbyists will likely win this.
At least one of the excuses used by car manufacturers to not reveal details/etc on their engines has been that "modification could cause it to fall outside of emissions specifications." I don't see why Deere et all wouldn't try the excuse.
I own one with a 35hp engine detuned to 25hp to legally bypass emission regulation. Just a fuel regulator screw turned down and timings modified. The exact same tractor with the screw turned up is about 10% more expensive and has a DPF which decreases reliability. The uptuned model also has an ECU and is harder to repair, whereas non-emission model can be (is) almost purely mechanical.
I've read before that for the average homeowner, the particulate/NOx/CO emissions from their little 5 HP 4-stroke carbureted lawnmower and 40cc 2-stroke carbureted blower/stringtrimmer/etc are often greater than that of their 150 HP automobile - which has an ECU and oxygen sensors and fuel injectors and catalytic converters and so on.
The price bump to go up to the 33 HP engine with the emissions controls was significant (much more than the 8HP performance bump), and every 30 hours or so it wants to run a "regen" cycle which always seems to be at the worst possible moment in my workload, but I feel a lot less guilty about running it knowing that my exhaust isn't nearly as bad for the environment and for my lungs as it could be at a slightly lower performance tier.
Also makes it so you don't have to avoid breathing the cloud of smoke when it starts up or grunts, nor get black shit caked all over your loader frame. Part of me wishes I bought >25hp for the emission system. Of course it's natural to always want more tractor than you have.
As a small land owner I don't think I could find a way to put 2 hours on my tractor in a day, so that I need to recharge overnight after 2 hours of use isn't even a loss. And not having to deal with diesel would be a big savings.
Edison Motors up in Canida is going this with OTR trucks for the logging industry.
Via HN a little while back, I came across a guy importing electric versions of things like front loaders, forklifts, excavators, etc. Intriguing, but less compelling if you have to buy 2-4 pieces of equipment rather than one jack-of-all-trades. Although if I were going to have to maintain multiple pieces of equipment, I'd definitely prefer them to be electric!
I can end up putting in more than 2 hours a day, but I think the math still works out for most homeowner use. I think the main thing it doesn't work out great for is long dirt-engaging operations like for actually farming a large field. But it's not like the subcompacts are really made for that either, and they're quite popular.
It would be really interesting to see what could be done with linear actuators instead of hydraulics, too. Although I suspect heat dissipation would be a problem, and working on hydraulics is pretty cool in and of itself.
Hey, this might be a case of "enemy of my enemy is my friend." If the Right needs to use the "anti clean air" angle to convince their base, so that we can take a baby step towards a DRM-free future, I say let them.