> "If a farmer bought the tractor, he should be able to do whatever he wants with it," Kevin Kenney, a farmer and right-to-repair advocate in Nebraska, told me. "You want to replace a transmission and you take it to an independent mechanic—he can put in the new transmission but the tractor can't drive out of the shop. Deere charges $230, plus $130 an hour for a technician to drive out and plug a connector into their USB port to authorize the part."
[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/why-american-farm...
The security system on some cars talks to keys electronically, and relies on a chain of trust between components. Kinda makes sense - you don't want a thief to be able to reach under the car, plug into a cable and issue the unlock doors command. The practical upshot of this is replacement doors won't unlock the central locking, unless you have them installed by the stealership. This happened to my father, when someone reversed into his car in a car park and dented his passenger side door.
The go-to example used by car manufacturers when they want to advocate for this lock-in is 'counterfeit' airbags. You can google and find reports of this sort of thing - authentic-looking airbags selling for $200 when the manufacturer charges $400. Some of them aren't as good as manufacturers' parts - and short of discharging the airbag, buyers have no way to check their quality.
The car manufacturers would then argue that unscrupulous second hand car salesmen might not tell you the car had a non-original airbag.
Looking to the future, in some articles about self-driving cars you'll hear that cars of the future will communicate with one another, allowing drafting between cars at highway speeds, and intersections without traffic lights [1]. If such a system comes to exist, I sure hope bad actors wouldn't be able to remotely crash my car - and I'm sure car manufacturers will use this as an excuse to lock out owner and third party repairs.
