Right to Repair — When the Law Arrives After the Engineering

From state repair laws and sealed batteries to military maintainability, classic cars and the Trabant: why a legal right to repair may mean little when the product was never designed to be economically repairable.

1. The Right to Repair sounds simpler than it is

At first sight, the Right to Repair appears to concern an elementary proposition: if a person owns a product, that person should be able to repair it, have it repaired by an independent professional or obtain the parts and information reasonably necessary to keep it working.

The proposition becomes considerably less elementary when it encounters modern engineering.

Suppose that a smartphone works perfectly for three years and its battery then deteriorates. Or that the central display of a modern vehicle develops an electronic fault after the warranty has expired. There is no allegation of a manufacturing defect. The owner is willing to pay. He simply wants the product restored to working condition.

The first question appears to be legal: does the owner have a right to repair it?

But another question soon becomes more important:

Was the product designed so that repairing it would ever make economic sense?

That distinction changes the entire debate.

A legislature can require access to spare parts, diagnostic software, manuals and tools. It can prohibit certain contractual or technological restrictions. It can protect independent repair businesses. It may even require a manufacturer to offer repair in defined circumstances.

None of those measures, however, can retroactively transform the architecture of a product.

If a minor failure has been incorporated into a module that can only be replaced as a complete assembly costing several thousand dollars, the product may be legally repairable while remaining economically close to irreparable.

2. Warranty is not the same as repair

Much confusion in this debate comes from treating warranty protection and repairability as if they were the same thing.

They are not.

A warranty primarily asks who bears the economic consequences of a defect during a particular period. Right to Repair asks a different question: whether the product can realistically remain in service after a failure, including when the warranty has expired or when the owner caused the damage himself.

If a telephone falls at the beach and the screen breaks, the manufacturer may have no warranty responsibility at all. That does not answer whether the owner should be able to obtain a screen, obtain the necessary instructions and have an independent technician install it without encountering an artificial software barrier.

The battery provides an even clearer example.

A rechargeable battery is not an unexpected defect. Its deterioration is a predictable consequence of using the product. In older forms of consumer electronics, components expected to wear out were frequently accessible precisely because they were expected to wear out.

If a battery is expected to wear out, replacing it should be maintenance, not surgery.

Yet contemporary devices have often turned battery replacement into an operation involving adhesives, heat, delicate disassembly and specialist tools.

European regulation is beginning to react directly to this problem. The EU Battery Regulation moves towards end-user replaceability of portable batteries, subject to important safety and technical exceptions. Separate European ecodesign rules already impose repair and spare-part requirements for smartphones and tablets.

This is not simply warranty law. It is regulation of the architecture surrounding the product after sale.

3. Two regulatory instincts

The United States and the European Union illustrate two different regulatory instincts, although neither system can be reduced to a single philosophy.

In the United States, Right to Repair has developed substantially through state legislation and through federal consumer-protection and competition law applied to particular repair restrictions. The Federal Trade Commission has examined practices including glued components, restricted access to spare parts, unavailable manuals, proprietary diagnostic systems and software barriers.

The central American concern has often been access: if an owner or an independent repairer is technically capable of performing a repair, should the manufacturer be permitted to prevent it?

That approach can produce significant practical results. A modern tractor, vehicle or electronic device may depend upon diagnostic software, electronic pairing or manufacturer-controlled information. Opening those resources to independent technicians can transform a repair market without changing the physical product.

Europe has increasingly moved further into the characteristics of the product itself.

Since 2025, smartphones and slate tablets sold in the European Union have been subject to ecodesign requirements covering matters such as spare-parts availability, software support and repair. Their energy label also includes a repairability class.

For the first time, a consumer standing in front of two technically similar devices can see repairability expressed as a product characteristic before either device has broken.

That may ultimately be more important than it appears.

A right exercised five years after purchase competes with the economic reality of a product that already exists. Information provided before purchase can influence which product is manufactured and bought in the first place.

4. The multi-thousand-dollar display problem

Automotive electronics provide a particularly useful example because the automobile already possesses one of the most developed repair ecosystems in industrial history.

Consider an older analogue instrument cluster.

It was not necessarily simple to repair. Many ordinary garages would not attempt an electronic repair themselves. Instead, the cluster could be removed and sent to a specialist. The specialist opened it, diagnosed the problem and perhaps replaced a capacitor, repaired a track, changed a small motor or corrected a defective connection.

The same instrument cluster returned to the vehicle.

There was an entire repair chain:

vehicle diagnosis → module removal → specialist component repair → original module returned → vehicle restored.

Now consider a highly integrated digital dashboard.

The workshop may identify a fault in the display assembly. But the manufacturer may define the complete assembly as the smallest serviceable unit.

The process then becomes:

fault detected → complete assembly ordered → complete assembly replaced → software configuration → vehicle restored.

Both procedures can formally be described as repair.

Economically and industrially, they are very different.

If a relatively inexpensive electronic component has failed inside a module costing several thousand dollars, the owner may possess an unrestricted legal right to repair and still face an irrational repair decision.

A product is not meaningfully repairable merely because the manufacturer is willing to sell you an entire replacement module.

The distinction is important:

component repair is not the same as module replacement.

Modern products will inevitably contain integrated modules. Nobody seriously proposes that every microprocessor should be replaceable by an ordinary consumer. Integration is often necessary for performance, safety, size, reliability and manufacturing efficiency.

The relevant question is instead whether the level at which replacement takes place is technically and economically reasonable.

If the smallest replaceable unit represents a substantial percentage of the value of the entire product, Right to Repair begins to encounter a limitation that law alone cannot easily solve.

5. Repairability is an engineering property

This leads to what may be the most important proposition in the debate:

Repairability is first an engineering property, and only afterwards a legal right.

Engineers already possess an extensive vocabulary for the subject: maintainability, modularity, accessibility, serviceability, diagnostic capability, mean time to repair and replaceable units.

None of this is technologically mysterious.

More demanding engineering environments demonstrate the point.

A military vehicle may be considerably more complex than an ordinary consumer product. Yet a military system cannot normally be designed on the assumption that a relatively minor failure will leave an expensive vehicle unavailable for an indefinite period while an enormous integrated assembly is replaced.

Military maintenance frequently works through defined levels of intervention. A defective Line Replaceable Unit may be exchanged rapidly in the field so that the equipment returns to service. The removed unit can then travel to another maintenance level where more complex work is performed.

The objective is not that a soldier repair every circuit board beside the road.

The objective is availability.

Military engineering does not merely ask whether something can theoretically be repaired. It asks how quickly the system can be returned to service.

That distinction matters because it demonstrates that modern complexity does not automatically require irreparability.

We know how to design sophisticated systems for maintenance when maintenance is treated as an engineering requirement.

The difference lies in what the system is being optimized to achieve.

Consumer electronics may optimize size, appearance, manufacturing cost, weight, water resistance and integration. A military platform may give greater weight to availability, diagnosis, modular replacement and logistical support.

Neither approach is inherently irrational.

But their consequences for the owner are radically different.

The most important decision concerning a repair may therefore have been taken years before the product failed, when an engineer decided what the smallest independently serviceable unit would be.

6. When repair was ordinary

Right to Repair also contains a historical paradox.

Societies are now creating elaborate legal rules to restore practices that previous generations often regarded as entirely ordinary.

A television set in the 1970s was not environmentally exemplary by modern standards. It might consume considerably more electricity than a contemporary screen. It was heavy, inefficient and technologically primitive.

But when it stopped working, the normal response was often to call a television technician.

The technician did not necessarily arrive carrying a replacement television. He arrived carrying tools.

The cabinet could be opened. Components could be identified. Service information existed. A failed capacitor, transistor, power-supply component or connection could sometimes be replaced without discarding the rest of the appliance.

This should not be romanticised. Repairs could be expensive. Diagnosis required skill. Old electronics could be hazardous. Many failures were difficult. The products themselves offered a fraction of the capability of their modern equivalents.

But the industrial assumption was different:

The object was expected to continue existing after something inside it had failed.

Even relatively modern computing provides examples.

The classic ThinkPad tradition treated batteries, memory, storage, keyboards and numerous internal components as serviceable elements. Opening the machine was not understood as an act of aggression against the product. In many cases, it was simply part of owning and maintaining it.

That does not mean that contemporary computers should return to the dimensions or engineering of machines designed decades ago.

It demonstrates something more modest and more important:

technological sophistication and repairability are not natural opposites.

7. From repair to replacement

The disappearance of ordinary repair cannot be explained simply by accusing manufacturers of planned obsolescence.

The history is more interesting than that.

Post-war Japanese industry transformed consumer electronics through manufacturing quality, miniaturisation, reliability, technological innovation and mass production. Products became better while their relative price fell.

This changed the economics of repair.

A skilled technician remained expensive. The cost of manufacturing an electronic product could meanwhile be distributed across hundreds of thousands or millions of units.

At some point, replacement began to compete successfully with repair.

Japan did not invent disposability. It made replacement economically attractive.

Or put more sharply:

Japan did not destroy repair. It helped destroy the economics that had made repair the obvious answer.

This is not a criticism of Japanese product quality. Quite the opposite. Many Japanese products became successful precisely because they were exceptionally reliable, sophisticated and competitively priced.

But once mass-produced electronics became inexpensive relative to skilled labour, the repair technician faced a new competitor: a brand-new product.

Korean industry later developed its own combination of scale, technology and global brands. China subsequently became the central manufacturing platform for an enormous part of the world’s electronics supply chain while also developing increasingly powerful brands of its own.

At the same time, electronic integration accelerated. Repairs gradually moved from replacing individual components to replacing boards, and from replacing boards to replacing complete modules.

The industrial culture changed with it.

Repair gradually stopped being an ordinary stage in ownership and became a specialised exception.

There is an additional commercial irony.

A manufacturer may benefit from persuading a consumer that the latest product is preferable to maintaining the old one. But a culture of continuous replacement teaches a broader lesson.

An industrial culture that spends decades teaching consumers that products are replaceable may eventually discover that consumers have also learned that brands are replaceable.

A durable product can create attachment. An object maintained for fifteen or twenty years may develop a history with its owner. A completely interchangeable product may not.

8. Mercedes, Harley and the Trabant

The automotive world illustrates three very different paths towards repairability.

Traditional Mercedes-Benz culture in Europe developed around a large industrial maintenance ecosystem: workshops, technical knowledge, spare parts, specialist suppliers and a substantial second-hand market. The existence of old vehicles in service was not necessarily hostile to the manufacturer. Maintenance itself became part of the economic ecosystem surrounding the brand.

Harley-Davidson offers a different American example. Maintenance, mechanical intervention and customisation became part of the relationship between machine and owner. A motorcycle could move from one rider to another while remaining economically and culturally alive through parts, workshops and an enormous aftermarket.

In both cases, repairability can contribute to residual value and brand identity rather than merely reducing future sales.

Right to Repair does not merely extend the life of a product. It can extend the life of the relationship between the product, its owner and the brand.

And then there is the Trabant.

Measured against a contemporary automobile, the Trabant is an absurd candidate for technological leadership. Performance, comfort, safety and emissions belong to another industrial era.

But apply a different test.

Can the owner see the mechanical systems?

Can many faults be diagnosed without proprietary software?

Can components be removed using ordinary tools?

Can a reasonably competent owner perform a significant amount of maintenance himself?

Can the vehicle remain operational decades after its production through relatively simple mechanical intervention?

Suddenly, the result becomes rather different.

The Trabant may fail almost every modern automotive benchmark and still outperform many modern products in owner-level repairability.

That is not an argument for returning to Trabant engineering.

It is a reminder that progress is multidimensional.

A product can become enormously safer, faster, cleaner and more sophisticated while simultaneously becoming less accessible to the person who owns it.

The Trabant is not a model for modern engineering. It is a reminder that technological sophistication and owner autonomy are not the same thing.

9. The environmental paradox

Repairability also complicates some apparently simple environmental narratives.

Modern regulation has understandably devoted enormous attention to energy consumption, vehicle emissions and operational efficiency.

Those are real environmental variables.

But they are not the only variables.

A product also contains an environmental cost before its first owner switches it on: extraction of materials, component manufacture, industrial processing, assembly and transport.

Replacing the product starts much of that process again.

This does not mean that maintaining an old product indefinitely is always environmentally superior. An old vehicle used intensively may consume much more fuel and emit considerably more pollutants than a modern vehicle. Replacing it may eventually produce a net environmental benefit.

But the answer depends upon the complete system.

A historic vehicle driven occasionally at weekends is not environmentally equivalent to the same vehicle driven fifty thousand kilometres a year. Likewise, a highly efficient modern vehicle driven every day and replaced frequently cannot be evaluated only by looking at its official consumption figure.

An inefficient product used occasionally may have a smaller total footprint than an efficient product used continuously and replaced frequently.

The same reasoning becomes even more important with consumer electronics, where operational energy use can be comparatively small while manufacturing sophisticated displays, semiconductors and batteries requires substantial industrial resources.

If replacing one worn battery extends the useful life of an otherwise functional device by several years, the environmental question is not simply whether the replacement battery itself can eventually be recycled.

The prior question is why the entire device should become waste because of the battery.

Recycling begins too late. The most efficient waste may be the product that never became waste.

This is where repairability and environmental regulation meet.

For many years, regulation became increasingly sophisticated at measuring what a product consumed while operating. It was sometimes less sophisticated at asking what would happen when a relatively minor component failed.

A sustainable product should not force society to choose between operational efficiency and reasonable longevity.

Sustainability is not only about making the next product more efficient. Sometimes it is about not needing the next product yet.

10. Information before rights

This brings the analysis back to law.

There is an obvious temptation to respond to every repair problem with another legal entitlement.

Sometimes that works.

If a manufacturer uses software to prevent a perfectly compatible replacement component from functioning, law may remove an artificial barrier. If independent workshops cannot obtain diagnostic information available to authorised dealers, an access obligation can create genuine competition. If consumers cannot purchase ordinary spare parts, availability requirements can make a meaningful difference.

But law reaches a more difficult frontier when the problem is the architecture of the product itself.

A legislature can require a manufacturer to sell the display assembly.

It cannot easily decide what the display assembly should have contained.

It can require repair information.

It cannot make a badly integrated module inexpensive to repair.

It can prohibit artificial software restrictions.

It cannot legislate a sensible circuit board into existence after the product has already been designed.

Attempting to regulate the internal architecture of every product would itself create serious problems. Technologies change rapidly. Safety requirements differ. Integration can provide genuine advantages. A legislature is rarely the ideal place to determine the correct number of modules inside an electronic device.

This makes the European experiment with repairability information particularly interesting.

Instead of attempting to decide every design choice for the manufacturer, the regulator can make repairability visible to the purchaser.

Imagine two otherwise comparable products.

One receives a high repairability classification. Spare parts will remain available. The battery is replaceable. Critical modules can be obtained separately.

The other receives a poor classification. Major assemblies are highly integrated and expensive. Independent intervention is difficult.

The consumer can still buy either one.

But the characteristic is no longer discovered five years later, after the product fails.

It becomes part of the purchasing decision.

Perhaps the most effective Right to Repair is not a right exercised after the product breaks, but information available before the product is bought.

This approach is particularly interesting in the United States.

American Right to Repair policy has concentrated heavily on access to parts, tools, software and independent repair. There is no equivalent nationwide mandatory repairability label comparable to the European smartphone system.

Yet a disclosure-based solution would fit comfortably within a market-oriented philosophy.

The government would not necessarily tell the manufacturer how to construct the product.

It would tell the consumer what has been constructed.

Battery replaceable: Yes or No.

Independent diagnostic access: Yes or No.

Critical spare parts available for: X years.

Major display serviceable only as complete assembly: Yes or No.

Repairability class: A, B, C, D or E.

Then the market can decide whether repairability has value.

That may be a more realistic intervention than attempting to guarantee that every future repair will be economically rational.

11. When ownership means less than it used to

The Right to Repair will not bring the 1970s back.

Nor should it.

Modern products are safer, more efficient, more capable and frequently more reliable than the products they replaced. A contemporary smartphone cannot be engineered like a transistor radio, and a modern electric vehicle cannot be maintained like a Trabant.

But neither conclusion requires accepting that every predictable failure should lead to the replacement of an enormous integrated assembly.

The reasonable objective is narrower.

A battery expected to deteriorate should be replaceable without unnecessary surgery.

An independent technician should not require the manufacturer’s permission to install a functionally compatible component.

Parts that can sensibly be modular should not become indivisible merely because replacement of the whole assembly is convenient for the supply chain.

And consumers should be able to know, before buying, whether the product they are considering has been designed with maintenance in mind.

Right to Repair is therefore about something larger than spare parts.

It concerns the practical meaning of ownership in an age in which physical objects increasingly depend upon software, proprietary tools, integrated modules and manufacturer-controlled ecosystems.

A person may legally own a product while possessing progressively less practical authority over what happens inside it.

The smarter the product became, the less authority the owner sometimes retained over it.

The law can restore some of that authority. Competition can restore some of it. Better consumer information can restore some of it.

But the decisive question remains an engineering question.

When this product eventually fails, was it designed so that repairing it would still make sense?

That question should perhaps be asked before the first unit leaves the factory, not after a legislature discovers that millions of owners can no longer repair what they have bought.

Law can protect access to repair. Engineering determines whether there is anything worth repairing.