Whether it be electronics, automobiles or medical equipment, the manufacturers should not be able to horde “oem” parts, render your stuff useless if you repair it with aftermarket parts, or hide schematics of their products.
Summary video by Marques Brownlee
Great channel covering and advocating right to repair, Lewis Rossman
Releasing docs on a car that has not been in production for a decade and only about 2k were ever made in the first place is not what i would call any sort of win for right2repair.
If Tesla did the same for an in production model, now that would be news worthy.
I was pretty careful in specifically not naming this a "win", just "great". A true "win" would be a recent model as you mention.
Personally however, it's not 1980s/90s anymore where recieving a service manual with your purchased property was the minimum standard - I feel the bar is pretty low in general when discussing companies' attitudes providing owners with the full documentation and firmware for their property
I thought this was noteworthy, taking into account Tesla's previously horrible attitude towards people who repair and rebuild totalled teslas, where the company subsequently remotely disables onboard features such as autopilot and the ability to use a supercharger as soon as they find out. This car has neither of those features of course, but it at least hopefully sets some kind of precedent.
Despite the age and production quantities, it's still extremely rare for any company/manufacturer to actually release these materials to the public IMO - particularly including the firmware and diagnostics tools on GitHub, meaning owners don't need to waste time reverse engineering their own vehicle, or be stuck paying someone else to figure out why it isn't working...
Hopefully this move helps encourage more auto manufacturers to start releasing resources for their vehicles to the public, instead of restricting these to specific dealers (some of which thankfully leak some to the public 👌)
Tech specs : we duct taped a battery and electric motors to an Elise /s