The Federal Trade Commission is investigating tractor manufacturer John Deere over long standing allegations that Deere makes its farm equipment hard to repair. The investigation has been ongoing since 2021, and we know more about it now thanks to a court filing made public on Thursday.
The stated purpose of the FTC’s [investigation] is ‘[t]o determine whether Deere & Company, or any other person, has engaged in or is engaging in unfair, deceptive, anticompetitive, collusive, coercive, predatory, exploitative, or exclusionary acts or practices in or affecting commerce related to the repair of agricultural equipment in violation of Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act
John Deere has been notorious for years for making its farm equipment hard to repair. Much like today’s cars, John Deere’s farm equipment comes with a lot of computers. When something simple in one of its tractors or threshers breaks, a farmer can’t just fix it themselves. Even if the farmer has the technical and mechanical know-how to make a simple repair, they often have to return to the manufacturer at great expense. Why? The on-board computers brick the machines until a certified Deere technician flips a switch.
Farmers have been complaining about this for years and Deere has repeatedly promised to make its tractors easier to repair. It lied. John Deere equipment was so hard to repair that it led to an explosion in the used tractor market. Old farm equipment made before the advent of onboard computing sold for a pretty penny because it was easier to repair.
In 2022, a group of farmers filed a class action lawsuit against John Deere and accused it of running a repair monopoly. Deere, of course, attempted to get the case dismissed but failed.
Chief among Deere’s promises was that it would provide farmers and independent repair shops with the equipment and documentation they needed to repair their equipment. The promises of the memorandum have not come to pass. Senator Elizabeth Warren called Deere out in a letter about all of this on October 2. “Rather than uphold their end of the bargain, John Deere has provided impaired tools and inadequate disclosures,” Warren said in the letter.
I just got my first computer controlled vehicle, a 2007 Volvo XC70. It's fucking insane. The same code scanner equipment and software that the dealership has access to needs to be included with the car at purchase, and that equipment needs to be universal to all vehicles of that model, so it's readily available on Ebay as cars go out of service. It's the only solution I can think of to keep auto manufacturers from charging way to much for it like they do all of their parts/tools. You also should get all of the files that are relevant to the car with the car, in case you need to reprogram a module from another car. This stuff should also be available in some sort of database or something, maybe even government hosted, in case the files that came with the car get lost.
Instead, community members are left to reverse engineer and scrounge around to get tools working on their own. It's genuinely insane how impossible it is to diagnose issues with modern vehicles as a home mechanic.
Sometimes you can't fix something simply because you can't replace a part with one from another car because it needs to be reprogrammed, but the dealership won't reprogram it, and they also won't give you the files so you can reprogram it yourself.