Technical information - some misconceptions

There's more rubbish talked about the block exemption than just about any other piece of legislation in the entire world. Today I have been reading postings on a consumer website, where a Vauxhall representative was being engaged in discussions about customer care issues.

He - unwisely - mentioned that his colleagues had helped one consumer with some vehicle information. He was shot down by another poster who said that the block exemption had imposed a legal obligation on Vauxhall "to make freely available service and technical information available to all who wanted it as opposed to restricting it to dealers only". Wrong. Even assuming that "service information" is an accurate paraphrase for what is covered in addition to technical information, it only ever had to be made available to "independent operators", which includes a longish list of undertakings - but consumers are not "undertakings", the key feature of which is that they are engaged in economic activity. All manner of professional repaires are covered, but not the DIY mechanic.

That was the old regulation: the new one is silent on the matter, so now a fortiori that statement is wrong although the guidelines contain very similar language.

But at an even more fundamental level the block exemption never required vehicle manufactures to do anything, it merely offered them an easy way to operate certain restrictions on competition in their dealer agreements. In prctice, of course, they chose (generally) to comply, but it's quite wrong to read the block exemption (version 1, 2, 3 or 4) as making anything compulsory. To do so might offend against the competition rules, but that would take a lot of proving. Now, however, it could also be in breach of Regulation 715/2007, so the sweeping statement is closer to the truth than it deserves to be.