REO calls on the House to restore three repair protections before the floor vote

Re: Repair provisions of H.R. 7389, the Motor Vehicle Modernization Act of 2026, as carried in the BUILD America 250 Act (H.R. 8870). Request to restore three consumer repair protections before the floor vote.

Dear Speaker Johnson, Leader Scalise, Leader Jeffries, Chairman Guthrie, Ranking Member Pallone, Chairman Graves and Ranking Member Larsen:

REO Industries is a new American automaker. We are reviving the R.E. Olds Motor Car Company name, retired in 1975, to build the Runabout: a compact, body-on-frame gasoline truck and SUV line that starts at $21,500 and will be assembled in Texas. Since reservations opened on June 16, 2026, more than 33,000 Americans have paid a deposit to reserve one. They come from every part of the country. Texas, California and Florida lead in total reservations; Montana, Alaska and Idaho lead per capita. These are working people who want a truck they can afford to buy and afford to keep.

We are writing as an automaker, and as far as we know the only one, willing to say it plainly: the right to repair is good for our customers, good for the independent shops that service most of the vehicles on American roads, and good for any manufacturer that builds a vehicle it is not afraid to have opened up.

Our commitments are already public at reotrucks.com. Every body panel comes off with common tools. Diagnostics read in plain English on a thirty-dollar scanner. A public parts catalog, at published prices, guaranteed for twenty years. No parts-pairing, in writing. No subscriptions and no feature locks. We will meet these standards from our first truck, and we ask Congress to hold every manufacturer that sells in America to the same floor.

We support Section 202 of H.R. 7389 as reported by the Energy and Commerce Committee, which writes the 2014 and 2015 industry repair agreements into law and gives the Federal Trade Commission the power to enforce them. That is real progress. But the committee text dropped three protections from the REPAIR Act (H.R. 1566) that matter most to a truck owner standing in a shop. We ask the House to restore them, in substance, before the floor vote:

1. 1.No impairing repair. A manufacturer may not impair an owner's, or the owner's chosen shop's, access to the diagnostic, repair, calibration and recalibration information and tools needed to fix the vehicle, and must offer that information and those tools on fair and reasonable terms.
2. 2.No blocking parts. A manufacturer may not use parts-pairing, serialization, or software locks to prevent a compatible replacement part from working, whether that part comes from the manufacturer or from someone else.
3. 3.A place to complain, with a clock. An owner or an independent shop may file a complaint with the FTC, and the FTC must act on it within a set period.

None of these provisions requires a manufacturer to redesign a vehicle. They require only that a company which sold you a truck not stand between you and the person you hire to fix it. Any automaker that objects to these three sentences should be asked to explain, on the record, why its customers cannot be trusted with their own vehicles.

Current highway and transit authorities expire on September 30. If the repair title moves with the BUILD America 250 Act, we ask that it move with these protections intact. If it moves separately, we ask for the same. Either way, REO would welcome the opportunity to testify.

Thank you for your work on this bill.

Respectfully submitted,