After criticizing the new right-to-repair initiative in Massachusetts, claiming it will weaken their cybersecurity, Tesla is now giving owners access to a lot of new information about their vehicles. Tesla is granting its vehicles owners access to service manuals, repair guides, diagnostic tools, and more for free.
With the new access, one of the first to check it out was the infamous Tesla hacker and tech guru ‘green’ (@greentheonly). According to Green, this feature will be great for “Tesla tinkerers,” and incredibly helpful for new EV owners, or even traditional neighborhood mechanics, in understanding the new technologies these vehicles offer, and how to fix them!
After working his way through the new software, green took to Twitter to lay it all out for the Tesla community showing us how to access the toolbox and all the ways we can use it.
When the state of Massachusetts introduced the right-to-repair law, Tesla almost immediately began contacting customers in the state trying to sway them to vote against the initiative. Massachusetts voted in November to extend its right-to-repair law.
According to the new initiative: “The measure would extend the state’s right to repair laws to include telematics systems. Telematics systems contain car data that is stored outside the vehicle and may include information that relates to navigation, GPS, and mobile internet. The measure would require cars sold in Massachusetts starting with the model year 2022 to equip any cars having telematics systems with a standardized open access data platform. Independent repair shops and mechanics would, with owner permission, automatically have access to the vehicle’s data to use it for diagnostics and car repair. Currently, this data may only be used by manufacturer repair shops unless permission is granted.”