The right to repair

In many developed countries around the world, the Right to Repair has progressed far. It would be interesting to see what happens in South Africa, says Mic van Zyl.

While the past couple of months have been challenging for all of us, it has afforded me the opportunity to catch up on quite a bit of reading. Something I revisited recently was the campaign regarding the Right to Repair in South Africa. This has to do with the right of an owner to service and repair their vehicle at a non-franchised repair centre for the entire life of the vehicle thus not affecting the new vehicle warranty. On the one hand you have the vehicle manufacturer (OEM) that designs, develops and engineers a new vehicle. They then sell these vehicles and have to offer the new vehicle owner some type of warranty to give the vehicle owner peace of mind with their new, often expensive, acquisition. Unlike household appliances, motor vehicles are very dynamic pieces of equipment with thousands of moving parts. It is imperative to regularly service a vehicle according to the service schedule as defined by the vehicle manufacturer. Understandably, vehicle manufacturers specify that, for them to uphold the warranty that they have to offer, they require the vehicle to be serviced and maintained by their own workshops. I get this and I agree.

ON THE OTHER HAND, you have the non-OEM repair workshops like Joe’s Auto repair down the road. In developed countries these small businesses often account for more than 60% of all jobs. These workshops are excluded from the repair and maintenance of new vehicles due to the warranty implications as mentioned above. Furthermore, these independent workshops are excluded from repairs to modern vehicles due to the increasing complexity of these vehicles. They currently do not readily have access to the OEM repair manuals that are required for fault finding and repairing much of what can go wrong with these very complex new vehicles. Currently in South Africa there are long and drawn-out negotiations underway to change the above scenario. In many developed countries around the world though, the Right to Repair has progressed far. Vehicle manufacturers are obliged to make available all technical aspects of their products to the aftermarket manufacturing and repair industries to enable these industries to compete with the OEM’s on a much more even footing. While extended warranties and service plans have in the past been a means for OEM’s to keep the repairs and maintenance on new vehicles ‘in-house’, this has changed significantly.

I MUST ASK HOWEVER, what is the impact on all of this for me? I’ve been fortunate that I have pretty much always bought my vehicles new from an official dealership. Some of them came with a service plan and some did not. Those that did not have a service plan have always been serviced by the dealership. For the most part they have always been Toyotas. I have thus rarely had any vehicle issues outside of normal scheduled servicing. One could say that I have limited experience with vehicle repairs outside of the normal service schedule. Our company does, however, run a large fleet of delivery and staff company vehicles that I have been involved with for 27 years. I have found that, as a general rule, repairs effected by non-OEM repair centres were often not up to the standard of the OEM repair centre. Not in all cases but often enough to be a concern. Certainly, we have also had issues with repairs carried out by the OEMs, but these instances have been very few and far between. I think it would be good to be able to readily rely on an aftermarket repair centre to be able to repair a vehicle successfully that is outside of the original manufacturer’s warranty. Expecting a vehicle manufacturer, however, to honour a vehicle warranty when said vehicle has been serviced or repaired by a non-OEM workshop is, in my opinion, not fair.