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Disclosure: I work for GM, everything expressed here is solely my own opinion. I think people see car companies as a huge monolith with nearly limitless resources. I can see where this comes from, but those resources are split into silos, and those silos have limited capacity. Especially for companies like Subaru, which is actually pretty small comparatively. They may have done a cost-benefit analysis and decided that the investment was not worth the money they get from selling those option packages. --- On a broader level, I think right to repair can be perceived as a feature, but many executives have a default negative stance on openness. I think of it like the GM LS engine. If you're at all familiar with car modification, you've heard of the LS Swap - people changing the engine that came with their car for a larger, more powerful, more versatile GM V8 engine. The LS swap ecosystem grew because the engines were relatively cheap, relatively easy to work on, and relatively reliable (your mileage may vary). Imagine if GM executives had tried to lock down the engine swap environment. |
John Deere has actually been saying this (that they're working on it as fast as they can and it will be ready any day now) as they stall for years and refuse to actually make their software available to purchasers, even though the software itself actually already exists, since dealers have it, and they could literally just hand people copies with zero additional work.