On May 21, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 48 to 1 to advance a right-to-repair bill. Trade press treated the lopsided margin as a rout, a rare case of Washington actually agreeing on something. Independent repair shops, automakers, and the current administration all found something to like in it.
That kind of unanimity should make you suspicious. Bills that make everyone happy usually got there by giving up the parts that would have made someone genuinely unhappy. This one did exactly that.
John Filippone can tell you what that costs in real dollars. At Piedmont Tire and Auto in Virginia, a customer once paid an extra $1,200 for a repair the shop could have finished in-house, if the automaker had released the software needed to complete the reprogramming. Instead, the car went to a dealership to get programmed, then came back. That single repair is a small, specific example of a much bigger number: the Auto Care Association estimates data-access limitations cost independent shops $3.1 billion a year, industry-wide.
For two years, a bipartisan group in Congress had been pushing the REPAIR Act, formally the Right to Equitable and Professional Auto Industry Repair Act, sponsored by Reps. Neal Dunn and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in the House, with Sens. Ben Ray Lujan and Josh Hawley carrying a Senate companion. Its central promise was data access: independent shops and vehicle owners would get the same diagnostic codes, repair software, and wireless telematics data that dealerships already have.
That last piece is the one that actually mattered. Telematics is how a modern car talks to the world, the cellular and Wi-Fi links that push over-the-air updates and relay trouble codes back to a manufacturer’s servers, increasingly standing in for the physical OBD-II port under the dash. On a 2015 sedan, a technician plugs in a cable and reads the codes directly. On a growing share of new vehicles, especially EVs, that same information travels wirelessly, and only the manufacturer controls the door on the other end.
In May, the House Energy and Commerce Committee didn’t send the REPAIR Act to the floor. Instead, it set that bill’s text aside and grafted a narrower repair title onto an entirely different bill: H.R. 7389, the Motor Vehicle Modernization Act of 2026. The detail buried under the celebratory 48-1 vote count is this: the telematics access mandate didn’t survive the transplant.
Here’s the part almost nobody wrote about. H.R. 7389 wasn’t drafted as a repair bill at all. Rep. Brett Guthrie introduced it in February as a 39-page overhaul of how NHTSA runs its own safety programs, reforming the New Car Assessment Program, setting deadlines for safety rulemakings, modernizing VIN data standards, even studying automated wheelchair securement systems. Right to repair wasn’t in the original text anywhere. It got bolted on later, during committee markup, as a consolation prize for a standalone bill that couldn’t secure its own floor vote.
What survived that graft mostly codifies something that already existed. The repair language kept in H.R. 7389 makes a 2015 memorandum of understanding, a voluntary agreement automakers signed years ago with the aftermarket industry, enforceable under federal law, with the FTC empowered to police it for heavy-duty vehicles. That’s a genuine upgrade, turning a handshake into something with legal teeth. But the 2015 MOU predates the modern connected truck. It covers plug-in service tools and printed repair manuals. It says nothing about wireless data, because wireless data barely existed in its current form when the ink dried.
Congress just guaranteed the right to repair a car the way you could repair it a decade ago.
Manufacturers have gotten creative about restricting access through hardware, too, not just software. BMW recently patented a screw head shaped specifically to defeat standard tools, a small reminder that the fight over repair access isn’t only fought in committee rooms.
Follow the lobbying, not the press releases, to understand why telematics got cut. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the trade group representing major automakers, insists manufacturers have always supported repair access and notes that independent shops already perform most post-warranty service work. The National Automobile Dealers Association went further, formally urging lawmakers to keep the narrower H.R. 7389 language in place and reject the broader REPAIR Act outright. The incentive is easy to trace: over the past eight years, the share of vehicle repairs handled at franchised dealerships slipped from 33 percent to 29 percent, while the number of independent shops climbed from roughly 266,000 to 300,000. Every diagnostic step a dealer controls is a repair that doesn’t leak away to that growing independent market.
Even the White House’s involvement tells a version of this story. In June, President Trump met with Ford’s Andrew Frick, GM leadership, and Roger Penske about repair policy, then told reporters afterward: “They don’t want people to fix their car.” A June 29 presidential memorandum followed, directing the EPA to affirm what it calls a “Freedom to Fix.” The guidance the agency issued July 1 requires manufacturers to provide emissions-related service information, OBD data, training materials, and passthrough reprogramming tools for purchase.
That sounds sweeping until you read the fine print. The EPA’s authority runs through the Clean Air Act, so it only reaches systems tied to emissions controls. It’s guidance, not a codified rule, which means a future administrator could rewrite or withdraw it without Congress voting on anything at all. A memo is not a law. It’s a pause button, and pause buttons get pressed again.
A handful of states had already forced pieces of this fight on their own, passing laws that require manufacturers to share standard diagnostic and repair data within their borders, with coverage that varies more than most owners realize. Federal action was always supposed to close the gaps those state laws couldn’t reach. Right now, it’s closing fewer of them than the headlines suggest.
H.R. 7389 is expected to hitch a ride on the broader surface transportation reauthorization bill, and current transportation funding authority expires September 30, a deadline that will force some version of this legislation into motion whether or not telematics access ever gets added back in. The REPAIR Act itself, now sitting as H.R. 1566 and S. 1379, remains alive on paper: still bipartisan, still pending, and increasingly beside the point if its most consequential provision keeps getting left at the committee room door.
Here’s what to remember once the vote counts and press releases fade. The fight over right to repair was never really about whether an independent shop could plug in a code reader; that fight was mostly won years ago. The fight that matters now is over what happens when the code reader has nothing to plug into, when the diagnostic data lives on a server the manufacturer controls, reachable only through a wireless link the manufacturer built. Congress just voted to protect your right to fix the car you bought in 2018. Nobody in that committee room voted to protect your right to fix the one you’ll buy in 2028.