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Comment by tomrod

14 hours ago

Much like owning a home without an HOA attached, it is becoming harder and harder to meet this requirement.

It also seems to conflict with `right-to-repair` laws if the capability is legally required.

It really isn't. FB Marketplace is literally awash in perfectly serviceable vehicles that don't and can't phone home. For the budget conscious among us it's also significantly cheaper to buy a "clapped out" used older car and refresh the drive train than buying new or late model.

  • Besides the irony of a privacy-conscious user using facebook to buy a car... those "perfectly-serviceable vehicles" are 1. no longer manufactured, and 2. will not last forever.

    Unless a new age of unconnected cars becomes a reality in the near future, I don't see this being a long-term solution.

>Much like owning a home without an HOA attached, it is becoming harder and harder to meet this requirement.

The near universal proliferation of owner's associations and management groups and whatnot for developments larger than ~1ac (the EPA threshold, some states/towns have lower) is something you can lay at the feet of the Clean Water Act and it's implementation and precedents over the following decades.

The exact area of the buildings, the driveways, the community park and gazebo, etc, etc, are necessary features of the site plan that makes the math that is required to meet stormwater/environmental requirements. And and some legal entity has to be responsible for that in perpetuity. Enter the HOA. This is also why HOAs often won't allow you to expand your driveway or add a non-permeable patio, it could (prob not, but still) ruin the environmental calculations they're responsible for enforcing as a condition.

I'm not nearly as familiar with car regulatory stuff but I would bet a lot of money that they're using OTA telematics to check some sort of compliance box...

  • I believe it was Strongtowns reporting a few months back that HOAs are generally being driven by developers, the only folks with (a) land to build in bulk; (b) capital, relationships, and experience to get fully through permitting in bulk; (c) building a substantial fraction of SFH.

    • Strongtowns is happy to follow the money and incentives on all sorts of other issues. Why do they just throw up their hands and say "it's the developers" on this issue?

      Developers don't do anything that costs money, like set up an HOA, without a reason. The developers create the HOA because you need your >1ac residential development to pass stormwater permitting. While you theoretically could make each individual .25ac parcel you're putting a house on compliant it's infinitely cheaper to just ignore all that, grade everything toward the road, dig a ditch, send the contents of the ditch through your stormwater treatment features, build in a little margin to those items, show the permitting authority the numbers that prove it passes with flying colors and when some jerk says "but what if X Y Z changes" you point to the excess you built in and tell them to GFY.

      Now, where it really gets evil is when you start really pinching pennies or where the rules change over the course of the process making your numbers not work. Say you've got a lot of grade, a lot of rainfall, a lot of stormwater you gotta "treat". Well, you start adding rules to the HOA. Require certain parts of the lots remains grass or planter or whatever. Disallow patios, but do allow wood decks because the municipality considers those pervious, etc, etc. Or maybe the results you've got are marginal but you throw the bureaucrats a bone by saying you'll disallow car-ports and sheds in the HOA rules to prevent people from adding impervious surface. Or maybe you're uphill of some wetlands but not close enough to be regulated by default you promise to disallow working on cars and require people pick up their pet waste and not use lawn fertilizer or some other laundry list of certain things in order to make the local town's wetlands people comfortable not raising objection and claiming jurisdiction.

      And of course, however these rules and plans shake out, the HOA is responsible for implementation in perpetuity.

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  • There’s no reason that sort of compliance needs an HOA. Most places already have building codes enforced by mandatory government inspections for major renovations.

How do you think right-to-repair intersects with cars?

An obvious thing may be to say the software must be published or the spec released, but we've had computers in cars since the 80s. It seems like a tall task but people can and do reverse engineer entire ECU systems (See Trionic Tuning)

Another seemingly very obvious one - requiring manufacturers to publish specifications regarding ALL OBD interface options. Of course this immediately runs into trouble. Saab for example gated features of the security system to prevent key reprogramming, swapping of certain components without a dial out to the internet using specific saab software that runs on a laptop and interfaces.

  • > How do you think right-to-repair intersects with cars?

    Strongly. You don't own the thing you purchased if you can't legally repair it or legally obtain the knowledge to repair it. At beat you're paying an overpriced lease and granting a liability waiver.

    • I tend to agree. In my mind, it would be pretty cost efficient to put a builtin- system diagnostic utility in all new vehicles that provide at least moderately good tooling for the ODB. T