Quote:
Originally Posted by Lotus7
I'm convinced it's by design. Maybe I'm paranoid, but I sincerely believe that most, if not all car manufacturers do not want any independent repair shops and especially owners to have any access to working on "their" (note, I used “their”, not "our") cars. That attitude MAY be morally acceptable while the vehicle is under warranty, but once that warranty has expired , it’s clearly a way of forcing all owners back to the dealership and is a form of anti-competitive protectionism, that’s almost criminal.
It wasn't that long ago that you could purchase a detailed repair manual for any new car with the blessing, and help of the manufacturer for very low cost. All US car brands usually included an order form for the service manual in the Owner's Manual. Then, starting about 15 years ago, service manuals suddenly increased in price from $10 or $15 to several hundreds of dollars. The next stage was about 10 years ago when the only way to get a service manual was in PDF form on a CDROM, and only if you had a dealership "connection". Now service manuals are not made available to the general public AT ALL and in BMW's case are only available to dealerships on-line via secure on-line subscriptions so they can't be duplicated on CDR's. They're treated as proprietary information and guarded as though they contain the pass code to Bill Gate’s bank account.
Clearly, BMW, and most other new vehicle manufacturers, do not want anyone but their own shops having the capability to work on these cars. Clearly, it’s in their best interest from a service related profit point of view to do everything they can to keep other’s from being able to work on the cars.
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I've been told by both a Ford service manager and an independent BMW repair shop owner that the cars are now designed for the average owner to be difficult to work on. If fact the service manager told me that Ford purposely made the oil filter difficult to access and the BMW guy told me that within a few years he will not be able to work on the newer BMW's.
If my memory still serves me, the manufactures use to have repair manual order information in the back of the owner's manual.