Washington State recently became the eighth U.S. state to pass new right to repair legislation making it cheaper and easier to repair technology you own. At this point, roughly one-third of Americans now live in a state where some form of right to repair law has been passed, usually with broad, bipartisan, overwhelming public support.
But according to a new report by U.S. PIRG, most industries and companies aren’t really changing their ways. U.S. PIRG graded 25 products, five each in five different categories: dishwashers, phones, tablets, laptops and gaming devices. The manufacturers were graded as to how readily they provided customers with the parts and manuals needed to repair products.
The results were… not good:
“Of those products, 40% received a D or an F, 28% received Bs or Cs, and 32% received As. Of these products, we could not access a repair manual for 48%, and 44% had no spare parts available.“
Laptops generally fared pretty well, but no dishwasher in the study scored above a C. The study also found that Atari and Sony all failed to provide any repair materials for the game consoles reviewed by the organization.
One problem, as noted recently, is that none of the states that have passed such laws have bothered to enforce them. Companies in most states haven’t really been asked to do anything different. In some states, like New York, the bills were watered down after passage to be far less useful. I’ve yet to see a single state take meaningful action against any company for right to repair violations, despite the fact there’s clearly no limit of bad actors to take aim at.
That’s going to need to change for the reform movement to have real-world impact; but with states facing unprecedented legal threats across the board during Trump 2.0, meaningful consumer protection—and picking bold new fights with corporate giants—likely won’t be a top priority for cash-strapped states.