The Law Has Not Caught Up With the Physics
Part 3 of 3 | Inventor's Mind | Herbert Roberts, P.E. | Tuesday Engineering Series
The Law Has Not Caught Up With the Physics
Part 3 of 3 | Inventor's Mind | Herbert Roberts, P.E. | Tuesday Engineering Series
In Part 1: Mat Armstrong flew to Miami to save a crashed Bugatti Chiron Pur Sport. Bugatti locked the VIN and declared it beyond repair. Armstrong split the chassis in a Miami shop and proved otherwise. In Part 2: a tool kit at seven years old, the wind-up car with the stamped tin gear, and the Ship of Theseus — repair as the oldest honest relationship between a person and an object. Read Parts 1 and 2 first.
Before the law, there is the culture. And the culture is where the damage is most visible.
A generation that was never handed a tool kit and told the world is knowable is now producing consequences that no legislation has addressed and no manufacturer has been held accountable for. They are not subtle consequences. They are sitting in landfills, on roadsides, in dealer service bays, and in driveways where a car with an ignored yellow warning light is three weeks from a catastrophic failure that a ten-dollar sensor could have predicted.
Consider the four symptoms in sequence. The new iPhone every year is not driven primarily by failure — it is driven by a marketing system sophisticated enough to convince a functional device's owner that adequacy is inadequacy. The AAA flat tire call is the logical outcome of a generation that was never shown that a spare, a jack, and twenty minutes is all a flat tire requires. The ignored dashboard warning light is what happens when an object's attempt to communicate with its owner is received as noise rather than information — because nobody ever explained that the car is telling you something specific and actionable. And the unchallenged service overcharge is the direct result of an information asymmetry so complete that a customer pays $400 for a five-minute cabin air filter replacement because they have no framework for knowing it is a five-minute job.
These are not separate problems. They are the same problem expressed across four different transaction types. The root is identical in every case: an owner with no mechanical literacy is an owner with no negotiating position. The manufacturer and the dealer understand this. They have understood it for decades. And they have made business decisions accordingly.
An owner who cannot read a warning light is an owner who cannot challenge a service quote. The information asymmetry is not a side effect of the system. It is the system.
Planned Obsolescence Has No Countermeasure
This is the hardest truth in the entire series, and it needs to be stated without softening:
Planned obsolescence is a business model that has operated for seventy years without a legal countermeasure, because the costs are diffuse, the beneficiaries are concentrated, and the mechanism is invisible to the person buying the product until the moment it fails.
It operates on three levels simultaneously, and the countermeasures people believe exist only address one of them.
Physical obsolescence is the level most people recognize — engineering a product to fail at a predictable point. The stamped tin gear. The battery calibrated to degrade below useful capacity in eighteen months. The solder joint designed to crack under thermal cycling after three years of normal use. Right to repair has a partial answer here: if you can open it, replace the battery, reflow the joint, swap the gear, you can interrupt the failure cycle. This is what Mat Armstrong demonstrated in Miami. This is what the FTC is fighting for in federal court against John Deere. This is where the legislative wave — Colorado, Minnesota, New York, California, Oregon — is aimed.
Functional obsolescence is the level the law has barely touched. The product still works. The battery still charges. The engine still runs. But the ecosystem around it has been deliberately moved. The iPhone that runs the current operating system but cannot run the current apps because the processor is one generation behind the minimum requirement Apple quietly raised. The printer that accepts only the current cartridge format, which changed the quarter after your warranty expired. The car whose diagnostic port speaks a protocol the aftermarket scanner no longer supports because the manufacturer updated it without publishing the change. You can repair every physical component in the device and it still cannot do what it needs to do, because the software environment was shifted on a schedule the manufacturer controls and the owner never consented to.
Psychological obsolescence is the level with no countermeasure. The product works perfectly. The software runs. The battery holds its charge. The engine starts on the first turn. But the cultural signal has been sent, through advertising budgets larger than the GDP of small nations, that owning last year's model says something inadequate about who you are. The new iPhone every year is not a response to failure. It is a response to a marketing system that has redefined functional as obsolete and current as identity. No law addresses this. No right to repair statute reaches it. The only countermeasure is the one a seven year old discovers on a kitchen floor: that an object which works is an object worth keeping, regardless of what the billboard says.
The three levels operate together as a coordinated system. The manufacturer engineers the physical failure to establish a replacement cycle. They shift the ecosystem to make repair insufficient even when physically successful. They market the replacement as identity to make the cycle feel voluntary. Each mechanism is individually defensible in court. Together they constitute a system that extracts maximum revenue from minimum product life with no legal exposure at any layer.
The landfill is the invoice. Fifty million tons of electronic waste per year globally is what planned obsolescence actually costs — paid not by the manufacturer but by the soil, the water table, and the communities living adjacent to the processing facilities, the majority of which are in the developing world. The manufacturer books the revenue. The world pays the bill.
Where the Law Currently Stands
The legal system is moving. It is moving slowly, unevenly, and with enough carveouts and exemptions to fill a law review journal. But it is moving, and the direction is clear.
Colorado enacted the first agricultural right to repair law in 2023, effective January 1, 2024, requiring farm equipment manufacturers to provide owners and independent repair facilities the same access to parts, tools, and documentation available to authorized dealers. Minnesota, New York, and California followed with electronics right to repair legislation. California's Right to Repair Act — effective July 1, 2024 — requires manufacturers to make documentation, parts, and tools available to any owner or independent repair facility on fair and reasonable terms, covering devices from smartphones to home appliances, with fines up to $5,000 per day for violations. Oregon passed the first law specifically prohibiting parts pairing — the practice of binding components to specific devices through software authentication so that even genuine parts from the same manufacturer will not function unless authorized through the manufacturer's system. More than a dozen additional states introduced right to repair bills in the first two months of 2025 alone.
Apple, which spent years lobbying aggressively against right to repair legislation across multiple states, publicly supported California's SB 244 in 2023. Consumer advocates called it an unexpected about-face. The more precise description is a strategic concession under simultaneous pressure from legislators, regulators, and shareholders — one the company then worked to limit through exemptions and carveouts within the same bill it publicly endorsed. The iPhone released the year Apple publicly supported the California law remained as resistant to independent repair as its predecessors. The support was real. The product design change was not.
The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act of 1975 — still largely unknown to the American consumers it protects — already bars manufacturers from voiding warranties solely because an owner used a third-party part or an independent repair facility. The manufacturer must demonstrate that the independent repair actually caused the failure before denying warranty coverage. That federal protection exists now, for every consumer product, and has existed for fifty years. Most people have never heard of it. Most dealers act as if it does not exist. Most customers pay the authorized service price because they do not know they have the legal right to choose otherwise.
The FTC vs. John Deere: The Case That Changes Everything
The most significant legal action in the right to repair movement's history is not a state consumer protection statute. It is a federal antitrust lawsuit, and the distinction matters enormously.
On January 15, 2025, the Federal Trade Commission, joined by the Attorneys General of Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona, filed suit against Deere and Company in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The complaint alleges violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act and Section 5 of the FTC Act — monopolization and unfair methods of competition. Not consumer protection. Antitrust.
The mechanism at issue is Deere's diagnostic tool, Service ADVISOR — the only fully functional software capable of performing all repairs on Deere agricultural equipment. Deere made this tool available exclusively to authorized dealers. A limited version exists for farmers and independent repair facilities, but the FTC alleges it is deliberately inferior — incapable of performing the full range of repairs the complete version handles. The result: as Deere's equipment became increasingly dependent on software for basic mechanical functions, an ever-expanding list of repairs could only be completed through Deere's authorized dealer network. Deere maintained a 100% market share on restricted repairs. Dealers charged accordingly.
Farmers brought the human cost of this structure into sharp focus. Combines sitting idle during harvest windows measured in days, not weeks. The nearest authorized technician two hundred miles away and booked for a week. Crops that cannot wait. Revenue that cannot be recovered. The FTC's complaint quoted Senator Elizabeth Warren's finding that Deere's repair restrictions cost American farmers $4.2 billion per year in downtime and elevated repair costs.
Deere called the complaint meritless and pointed to its ongoing negotiations with the government. The company had previously signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation pledging to provide farmers the same tools available to dealers — but that agreement carried no enforcement mechanism and permitted Deere to withdraw with thirty days' notice. It was a promise without a penalty, and the FTC decided that was not enough.
In June 2025, a federal judge denied Deere's motion to dismiss. The case survived. Trial is pending. If the FTC prevails — or reaches a consent decree with structural teeth — the precedent extends well beyond tractors. An antitrust ruling that the withholding of diagnostic tools constitutes illegal monopolization of the repair aftermarket applies to every manufacturer that controls its own diagnostic ecosystem. That is not a narrow class.
The PE License Argument Nobody Has Made in Court
Everything above is documented, litigated, and moving through the legal system on its own momentum. What follows has not been argued publicly in the Armstrong case or in any right to repair proceeding I am aware of. It should be.
A Professional Engineer license is a state-granted credential. Its singular purpose is to authorize the holder to apply engineering knowledge and judgment in service of the public — to certify that a structure, a system, or a repair meets the standards required for safe operation. The PE stamp is a legal instrument. It carries personal liability. It is issued by the state. It supersedes preference.
That credential does not evaporate because a manufacturer locked a VIN.
If a licensed Professional Engineer assesses a repair, applies engineering judgment to the structural and mechanical condition of the vehicle, certifies that the work meets or exceeds the performance and safety standards required for the car's intended operation, and stamps that certification with their license number and their personal professional liability — on what legal basis does the manufacturer claim authority to override that determination?
Bugatti is not a licensing body. Mate Rimac holds no statutory authority over the practice of engineering in the United States, in Florida, or in any other jurisdiction where a PE-certified repair might take place. A PE license is issued by the state. The state's engineering authority does not dissolve at the boundary of a manufacturer's preferred revenue model.
The cost and conditions of that PE liability transfer are not defined by statute. No law specifies what a PE-certified independent repair of an exotic vehicle must cost. No law requires it to be performed in France. No law requires the parts to originate from the manufacturer at the manufacturer's price. Bugatti's $1.7 million quote is a business decision dressed as an engineering necessity. Rimac's decision to lift the parts blacklist under public pressure confirmed the necessity was negotiable — which means it was never a necessity. It was a price.
This argument reframes the entire dispute. Not owner versus brand. Not YouTube mechanic versus hypercar manufacturer. Licensed professional jurisdiction versus corporate revenue preference. A PE stamp certifies the repair is safe. The manufacturer's authorization certifies the repair is profitable for them. Only one of those is a public interest determination. Only one of those is backed by a state-issued credential and personal liability. The law has not been asked to choose between them in this context. It should be.
The Liability Gap They Cannot Close
Bugatti's stated justification for VIN lockdown is liability — the safety risk of structural repairs performed outside factory standards on a vehicle capable of 250 miles per hour. It is their strongest argument and the one that sounds most defensible in public.
Here is the gap in it they cannot close:
If a PE-licensed engineer certifies the repair, assumes the engineering liability, documents the work to a traceable standard, and stakes their professional license on the structural outcome — the manufacturer's liability argument collapses. They are no longer protecting public safety. They are protecting the margin. The liability has transferred to a credentialed professional with statutory authority. The manufacturer's refusal to support the repair at that point is not a safety decision. It is a commercial decision. And commercial decisions dressed as safety determinations are exactly what the FTC's antitrust framework is designed to address.
The Lemon Law Contradiction Nobody Has Named
Lemon laws were written on a foundational assumption so obvious that legislators never examined it: the manufacturer is the ultimate repair authority. If a vehicle cannot be fixed after a reasonable number of attempts through authorized channels, the manufacturer buys it back. The law grants the consumer relief precisely because it treats the manufacturer as the entity with both the obligation and the capability to make the product whole.
The right to repair record has now placed that assumption on federal trial.
The FTC's complaint against John Deere established on federal record that the authorized dealer network — the only legally permitted repair channel for restricted repairs — delivered neither the capability nor the competitive outcome the framework assumed. Farmers exhausted authorized repair attempts. Equipment stayed broken. Harvest windows closed. The monopoly the law implicitly endorsed failed the people it was supposed to serve.
Bugatti made the same failure explicit and public. The manufacturer claimed exclusive global capability over the Chiron chassis split. An independent engineer in Miami proved that claim false on camera in front of millions of viewers. The manufacturer's assertion of irreducible complexity did not survive contact with a determined professional who was willing to look.
The logical inversion is damning. Lemon laws say: if the manufacturer cannot fix it, the consumer gets relief. Right to repair evidence says: the manufacturer is sometimes structurally unwilling to fix it — not for engineering reasons but because their authorized network is optimized for revenue extraction, not repair outcomes. Which means lemon law protection and right to repair protection are not separate consumer issues. They are the same issue viewed from opposite ends of the same failure.
The deeper structural problem: lemon law relief triggers only after multiple failed repair attempts through authorized channels. If the authorized channel is the only legal channel — because the VIN is locked, the diagnostic tool is restricted, the parts are withheld — the consumer is forced to exhaust a remedy path the manufacturer controls before they can access legal relief. The manufacturer sets the pace of failure. They determine what constitutes a reasonable repair attempt. They control whether parts are available to attempt the repair at all. They have positioned themselves to define the conditions of their own accountability. The law handed them that position and has not yet noticed.
Lemon laws gave consumers relief when manufacturers could not fix their own products. Right to repair exposed that manufacturers frequently will not fix their own products. The law meant to protect the consumer assumed the very monopoly that makes the car unfixable.
The Engineering Absolute
Underneath all of it — the antitrust claims, the state statutes, the PE license jurisdiction, the lemon law contradiction, the planned obsolescence indictment — there is a foundational engineering truth that no manufacturer has ever successfully refuted and never will:
Nothing fabricated from parts is beyond disassembly. No part is beyond recreation or replacement — provided engineering integrity is maintained.
That is not opinion. It is the foundational premise of every repair, every overhaul, every failure analysis, every forensic investigation ever conducted in the history of manufacturing. The Chiron Pur Sport is carbon fiber, aluminum, steel, rubber, copper wire, and molded plastic assembled by human hands in a factory in Molsheim, France. It was built from parts. It can be disassembled into parts. Its components can be analyzed, recreated, and replaced by any engineer with the knowledge, tooling, and integrity to perform the work correctly.
The John Deere combine is steel, hydraulics, software, and sensors assembled on a production line in Waterloo, Iowa. The iPhone is glass, aluminum, silicon, and solder assembled by human hands in a factory in Zhengzhou, China. The wind-up car with the stamped tin gears was injection-molded plastic and sheet metal assembled on a line somewhere and sold in a box that implied precision it did not contain.
Every one of them can be opened. Every one of them will tell you the truth about how it was made and why it broke, if you are willing to look. The manufacturer does not own that truth. They assembled the object. They do not own the physics of the materials they used. They do not own the engineering principles governing how those materials behave under load, heat, impact, and fatigue. They own the trademark on the badge. They own the patent on specific innovations within a statutory term. They own the right to compete in the parts and service market through legitimate means.
What they do not own — what no manufacturer owns — is the right to be the sole arbiter of whether a repair is safe, the sole source of the parts that make a repair possible, and the sole authority over what happens to an object after a legal sale. The law is beginning to say so. The engineering record has always said so.
The Only Countermeasure That Has Ever Worked
The right to repair movement is fighting for access to parts, tools, and documentation. Those battles matter and some of them are being won. But the deeper fight — the one the legislative victories only partially address — is for the cultural transmission of mechanical literacy. The knowledge that passes from a person who opens things to a child watching over their shoulder. The permission structure that says the world is knowable and you are allowed to know it.
That transmission was how engineering knowledge moved through civilizations for ten thousand years before a manufacturer figured out how to make a screw that required a proprietary driver. It was interrupted not by a single decision but by a convergence of forces: a liability culture that decided tools were dangerous for children, a school system that eliminated shop class as an industrial-age relic, a consumer culture that reframed disposability as convenience and repair as an imposition, and a technology industry that built deliberate resistance to disassembly into its products and marketed the resistance as elegance.
The result is a generation that owns more technology than any generation in history and understands less of it. A generation that calls AAA for a flat tire. A generation that replaces a functional phone because the billboard said to. A generation that ignores the yellow light until the engine seizes because nobody ever explained that the car is trying to tell them something.
Planned obsolescence does not require a conspiracy. It requires only that the owner never learns to open the object. The stamped tin gear lasts exactly as long as the manufacturer needs it to last — which is until the warranty expires and the replacement cycle begins — because the owner never sees it. The moment you open the case, the business model is exposed. The moment you see how it was made, you see why it broke. And the moment you see why it broke, you understand what it would take to fix it — and whether it was worth fixing in the first place.
That understanding is what VIN lockdown, parts pairing, diagnostic tool restriction, and proprietary screws are designed to prevent. Not for safety. Not for quality. Because an owner who understands the object is an owner who cannot be charged whatever the system decides to charge. Because a customer who can fix the flat tire is a customer who does not need the roadside assistance subscription. Because a farmer who can clear the fault code is a farmer who does not need the authorized dealer two hundred miles away.
Armstrong opened the case. Rimac blinked. The parts blacklist was lifted. The FTC filed its complaint. Twelve states introduced legislation in eight weeks. The EU passed a Right to Repair directive. A federal judge denied the motion to dismiss.
The law is moving toward where the physics always was.
A tool kit at seven years old was a countermeasure against planned obsolescence. It just was not recognized as one at the time. Every child who learns to open something is a market the manufacturer loses permanent control of.
If you found value in this series, forward it to an attorney, a farmer, an independent shop owner, or a parent deciding whether to give a child a tool kit.
They are all fighting the same fight. The engineering record is on their side. The law is catching up. The only question is whether the culture catches up with the law before the next generation loses the instinct to open the case and look.
Herbert Roberts is a licensed Professional Engineer with 32 years in aviation R&D, 62 U.S. patents, and 8 years of forensic engineering consulting serving attorneys on product liability and failure analysis cases. He publishes the Inventor's Mind series at Substack.