mo1
Platinum Member
My $0.87 (used to be $0.02, but adjusted for inflation) is that this ends up going nowhere or nearly so. One, the tools and software are reported to be very expensive even to dealers, so even if you as a third party were allowed buy a $10,000/year subscription to a diagnostic program or pay $10,000 for a piece of diagnostic equipment, the price is so high that few can/would do so. Secondly, one of the big things the OEMs are trying to keep people from getting into is ECUs. They don't like people who buy the least powerful tractor in a model line to go turn up the fueling rate and boost on a tractor to make it essentially identical to the most powerful tractor in that line without paying the OEM more. However, the EPA really doesn't like it when people go into the ECU and tell it to ignore the fact that they've removed the DPF, EGR, and SCR and run normally instead of throwing reams of error codes and derating to 2 HP. I guarantee you somebody will do an emissions delete using the now-available diagnostic/technical software/equipment, and the OEMs will run to the FTC saying, "See! This is why we prevented them from doing this before!" and they'll be allowed to either encrypt their ECUs and/or prohibit access to diagnostic tools/software.
I can basically see this allowing the big time operators with equipment costing several hundred thousand dollars in "unlocking" some of the electronic monitoring features on their equipment that they would have normally had to pay more to enable. What the OEMs will thus do is just unlock this on all new units and raise the price the amount that the activation used to cost, essentially making everybody pay for these features regardless if they wanted them or not.
About the only good outcome from this is it may make some independent repair shops be able to work on newer equipment, but again, the large number of pieces of equipment and software they would need to service various pieces of equipment and the enormous amount it will all cost will severely blunt the benefit from the access.
I can basically see this allowing the big time operators with equipment costing several hundred thousand dollars in "unlocking" some of the electronic monitoring features on their equipment that they would have normally had to pay more to enable. What the OEMs will thus do is just unlock this on all new units and raise the price the amount that the activation used to cost, essentially making everybody pay for these features regardless if they wanted them or not.
About the only good outcome from this is it may make some independent repair shops be able to work on newer equipment, but again, the large number of pieces of equipment and software they would need to service various pieces of equipment and the enormous amount it will all cost will severely blunt the benefit from the access.