Washington Passed a Right-to-Repair Law. It Doesn't Cover Your Car.
Washington State has a right-to-repair law. It passed the House 94–1 and the Senate 48–1, and its core obligations took effect on January 1, 2026.
It covers your laptop. Your phone, tablet, television, smartwatch and fitness tracker. Your electric bike and electric scooter. Your digital camera, your keyboard, your amplifier. Your electric toothbrush and your hair clippers.
Your BMW is not covered. Neither is your Audi, your Mercedes, your Volvo or your Porsche. The law exempts motor vehicle manufacturers by name.
That is not an oversight, and it is not a scandal. But it does mean that almost everything most owners assume about their legal right to have their car repaired where they choose is wrong — and understanding what actually protects that right is genuinely useful, because it changes which questions are worth asking your shop.
What the Washington law actually does
The Right to Repair Act (ESHB 1483) requires manufacturers of covered products to make available — to any owner or independent repair provider, on fair and reasonable terms — the parts, tools and documentation needed to diagnose, maintain and repair those products.
It also limits parts pairing, the practice of using software to prevent a product from working properly with a replacement part that wasn't blessed by the manufacturer. Those limits apply to products manufactured and first sold in Washington after January 1, 2026.
The parts, tools and documentation duty began January 1, 2026, and reaches back to products first manufactured and first sold or used in Washington on or after July 1, 2021.
Enforcement runs only through the Attorney General, under the state Consumer Protection Act. There is no private right of action, which means an individual consumer cannot sue a manufacturer under this law directly.
It is a real law with real teeth. It simply does not point at cars.
The company your car keeps on the exemption list
Motor vehicle manufacturers are exempt. So are:
- Medical device manufacturers and distributors
- Utility, agricultural, construction and mining equipment
- Off-road equipment — tractors, farm and yard equipment, outdoor power equipment, marine and recreational vehicles
- Power generation and storage equipment, and solar equipment
- Life safety systems, fire alarm systems, intrusion detection and physical access control
- Certain provider-supplied set-top boxes, modems and routers, where equivalent replacement equipment is offered free
Some of these exemptions have obvious safety logic. The vehicle exemption has a different explanation: automotive repair access was already handled somewhere else, years earlier, and not by a legislature.
What actually protects your car repair: a handshake from 2014
Here is the part most owners have never heard.
In 2014, automakers and the independent aftermarket signed a national memorandum of understanding covering light-duty vehicles — those rated 14,000 pounds and under, which is every car in your driveway. A separate agreement followed in 2015 for heavy commercial vehicles.
The 2014 agreement commits manufacturers to make available to independent repair facilities the same diagnostic and repair information they provide to their franchised dealerships.
That is the foundation your independent shop stands on. Not a statute. A voluntary industry agreement, now twelve years old, backed by a dispute resolution panel rather than a court.
And by most accounts it has largely worked. Factory service information for European marques is purchasable. Manufacturer diagnostic platforms are available to independents. The reason a good independent shop can program a module or run a factory-level diagnostic session is that this access exists.
The open question is what happens as more of a car's function moves into software and data that the 2014 agreement never contemplated.
The federal bill that would have changed it — and the bill that replaced it
This is where 2026 got interesting.
The REPAIR Act (H.R. 1566), sponsored by Rep. Neal Dunn of Florida, would have gone considerably further than the 2014 handshake. It would have required manufacturers to give owners and independent shops direct access to vehicle-generated data covering diagnostics, repair, calibration and recalibration; delivered it through a standardized access platform; and barred manufacturers from interfering with the production of compatible aftermarket parts.
On February 10, 2026, the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade advanced it unanimously. Supporters treated that as a breakthrough.
Then, on May 21, 2026, the full Energy and Commerce Committee advanced something else: the Motor Vehicle Modernization Act of 2026 (H.R. 7389), by 48–1.
That bill takes a different approach. Rather than creating new data-access rights, it codifies the existing 2014 and 2015 memoranda and adds Federal Trade Commission enforcement authority over them. The REPAIR Act's direct data-access mandate, its standardized access platform and its aftermarket-parts provisions are not in it.
In other words: the handshake gets the force of law, but the handshake itself doesn't expand.
As of this writing the bill has not had a House floor vote. It has been moving toward floor consideration bundled into a broader surface transportation package, and the Senate had not advanced its own version.
The honest part: the industry does not agree on whether this is a problem
It would be easy for a repair shop to write this article as an alarm. The reality is more interesting, because the loudest voices saying access is fine are repair shops.
The Society of Collision Repair Specialists opposes the REPAIR Act. Its executive director, Aaron Schulenburg, has argued that existing arrangements already give shops what they need through manufacturer service portals and information aggregators, and that repair procedures simply don't require access to telematics data to fix vehicles. His position is that the real obstacles to proper repair aren't about access at all — they're economic and systemic pressures that reward cutting corners on manufacturer-required procedures.
Shop owners have said the same in their own words, including a collision repair operator in Redmond who wrote that he has never had trouble getting exactly what he needed to repair a vehicle properly. Dealer associations point to the 2014 agreement and its dispute panel as evidence the system functions.
On the other side, parts manufacturers and the CAR Coalition argue the opposite: that codifying a 2014 agreement expands nothing, and that handing it statutory status while adding no new rights entrenches the manufacturers' position.
There is also a wrinkle worth noticing. Much of the "access is adequate" testimony comes from collision repair, where the work is structural and the needed information is published repair procedures. Mechanical and diagnostic work on a late-model European car is a different problem — module programming, adaptations, coding after a part replacement, and the live vehicle data a factory platform exposes. Both groups are describing their own experience accurately. They are not describing the same job.
Massachusetts is the one state that went further
Massachusetts voters approved a vehicle data access law in 2020, and a federal judge upheld it in February 2025. Automakers appealed; the First Circuit has heard argument and, by reports, pushed the parties toward a negotiated resolution, with the state's Attorney General and the manufacturers' association agreeing in early 2026 to explore settlement.
Maine went down a similar road. Voters there approved automotive right to repair, a working group was convened, and in January 2026 an amendment bill was vetoed by the governor specifically because late additions would have let manufacturers decide how telematics data reaches independent shops. The House voted to override; the Senate sustained the veto, and the amendments died.
Washington has nothing comparable for vehicles. Our right-to-repair law is a consumer electronics law.
So what does this mean for you, practically?
Here is the useful translation, and it is not the one you might expect from a shop writing about repair rights.
For a European car owner on the Eastside, the binding constraint is almost never a legal one. The factory information and the factory diagnostic platforms are available to independents who pay for them — and they are expensive, marque by marque, renewed annually, with the training time to use them properly on top.
Which means the real divide isn't between dealers and independents. It's between shops that invest in manufacturer-level access and shops that work around not having it. A generic code reader and a factory platform will both pull a fault code. Only one of them will let someone adapt a replacement component to your car, or see the data the manufacturer's own technician sees.
That distinction is invisible on a shop's sign and obvious in the result. It's also the thing you can actually evaluate, today, without waiting on Congress.
Five questions worth asking any shop
- Do you have the manufacturer's own diagnostic platform for my marque? Not "a scan tool." The factory system for your make, by name.
- Can you do module programming and coding in-house, or is it sublet? Sublet isn't disqualifying — not knowing the answer is.
- If a part needs adapting to the car after fitting, do you do that? On modern European cars a correctly fitted part that was never adapted is still a fault.
- Who performs calibration work, and where? Particularly for anything camera or radar related.
- Will I get documentation of what was done? Your service history is yours, and it's worth money at resale.
Frequently asked questions
Does Washington's right-to-repair law cover cars?
No. The Right to Repair Act (ESHB 1483) took effect with its core duties on January 1, 2026, and exempts motor vehicle manufacturers by name. It covers consumer products with digital electronics — laptops, phones, televisions, e-bikes, small appliances and similar. Vehicles sit on the exemption list alongside medical devices, agricultural and construction equipment, marine and recreational vehicles, and life safety systems.
Then what gives independent shops the right to repair my European car?
Primarily a voluntary national agreement signed in 2014 covering light-duty vehicles rated 14,000 pounds and under, under which manufacturers make available to independent repair facilities the same diagnostic and repair information they give franchised dealers. A companion agreement followed in 2015 for heavy commercial vehicles. These are industry agreements with a dispute resolution process, not statutes — which is precisely why the federal legislation has been contested.
What happened to the federal REPAIR Act?
H.R. 1566 advanced unanimously out of a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on February 10, 2026. On May 21, 2026, the full committee instead advanced the Motor Vehicle Modernization Act of 2026 (H.R. 7389) by 48–1. That bill codifies the 2014 and 2015 agreements and adds FTC enforcement, but does not include the REPAIR Act's direct vehicle-data access mandate, standardized access platform or aftermarket-parts provisions. As of this writing it has not received a House floor vote.
Are repair shops in favor of right-to-repair legislation?
Not uniformly, which surprises most people. The Society of Collision Repair Specialists has opposed the REPAIR Act, arguing shops already obtain the information they need and that telematics data isn't required to carry out repairs — and that the real pressures on repair quality are economic rather than informational. Parts manufacturers and the CAR Coalition take the opposite view. Notably, much of the "access is adequate" case comes from collision repair, where the work and the information needed differ substantially from mechanical and software work on a late-model European car.
Does this affect whether I can use an independent shop instead of the dealer?
Practically, no — and that has been settled for a long time. Federal law has long prohibited conditioning your vehicle warranty on using the dealer for routine maintenance and repairs, provided the work is done correctly with appropriate parts. What this legislative fight is about is the depth of data and software access available to independents as vehicles become more software-defined, not whether you're allowed to choose your shop.
What should I actually do about any of this?
Ask your shop which manufacturer diagnostic platforms it owns for your marque, whether programming and coding happen in-house, and who performs calibration work. The legal question is being decided in Washington D.C. and Boston. The question of whether your specific car gets diagnosed properly is decided by the equipment and training in the building you drive it to.
Ask us the five questions
We would rather you asked. Eastside European Auto Service and Repair has been the Eastside's dealer alternative since 2010, with ASE-certified technicians, over 75 years of combined experience and factory-level diagnostic equipment for Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi, Volkswagen, Volvo, Porsche, Jaguar, Land Rover, MINI and Smart. Loaner cars available.
Call 425-823-8200 or book online. 12415 NE 124th St, Kirkland, WA 98034. Serving Kirkland, Bellevue, Bothell, Redmond, Issaquah, Mercer Island and Woodinville.
