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[Crissa]

If the documents exist, and they're part of the diagnosis of your vehicle, you have right to them.  It's no different than them being required to furnish you with the broken parts that they replace.

Getting it from them is more difficult, but it's not impossible.  They have to prove why repairs are needed, they also only vaguely have rights to diagnostic data from your vehicle... Courts have not always upheld the user agreements.

-Crissa

[BrianTRice@gmail.com]

This may be old news, but I was told by Zero today that they consider decoded logs for my SR/F to be proprietary information, and have a policy to not disclose them.

That is not news to me, but it is to the public. I wanted to hear that from another owner before disclosing what I heard privately, for reasons. That is in fact why I started this thread.

Do you have that in writing? May I contact you offline about this?

If the documents exist, and they're part of the diagnosis of your vehicle, you have right to them.  It's no different than them being required to furnish you with the broken parts that they replace.

Getting it from them is more difficult, but it's not impossible.  They have to prove why repairs are needed, they also only vaguely have rights to diagnostic data from your vehicle... Courts have not always upheld the user agreements.

Aside from owner education and curiosity, proving the need for repair is where owners would seem to have a legal stake in the event log and the related data. The complement to proving the need for repair is proving responsibility / causation. The owner, without the logs, cannot prove anything about the operation of the vehicle without live diagnostics. This could become critical if an owner or fleet operator enters litigation with Zero.

I find that this is particularly of concern for items like the motor controller which are the single most expensive component outside the battery case, and are indicated for replacement by (what I can tell) very crude troubleshooting flowcharts provided to dealers by Zero.

If this turns out to be true, I would consider this an alienating act by Zero towards its customer base, and it would make my efforts with the unofficial manual and related tooling more difficult in general. I may reconsider my support for Zero entirely.

I do not have an alternate vendor I can point to with a better policy. I've never seen Energica data, and I expect them to be just as jealous if not moreso about vehicle data.

[Crissa]

When push comes to shove, Zero so far has relented; but yeah, it's pretty standard in the vehicle industry not to share this data.

Standard, though, does not mean legal.

-Crissa

[Auriga]

I have a feeling it has to do with what is stored in the logs. I don't think Zero cares at all about whether owners can get a record of a bike's activity, or a list of errors when they occur. I think they probably use the same logs on the new platform to store software outputs. Maybe they have algorithms they are tuning and storing info in the logs. These things could represent the entirety of their advantage over competition with a much larger player.

There should probably be two sets of logs, one accessible  for regular owners and one not for proprietary info.
I think you're right Brian, but the right to repair movement hasn't had much success as of yet. And I suspect there needs to be a middle ground. Especially since vehicles are becoming more like software every day.

[BrianTRice@gmail.com]

When push comes to shove, Zero so far has relented; but yeah, it's pretty standard in the vehicle industry not to share this data.

Standard, though, does not mean legal.

An owner shouldn't need to serve Zero with a letter from a lawyer or sign an NDA to cooperate.

I have a feeling it has to do with what is stored in the logs. I don't think Zero cares at all about whether owners can get a record of a bike's activity, or a list of errors when they occur. I think they probably use the same logs on the new platform to store software outputs. Maybe they have algorithms they are tuning and storing info in the logs. These things could represent the entirety of their advantage over competition with a much larger player.

There should probably be two sets of logs, one accessible  for regular owners and one not for proprietary info.
I think you're right Brian, but the right to repair movement hasn't had much success as of yet. And I suspect there needs to be a middle ground. Especially since vehicles are becoming more like software every day.

If they don't want to disclose the information, it shouldn't be in the log. Logs are historically a legal record of the state and events encountered by a vessel (nautically, and yes I used to be a US Navy sailor who signed paper logs for nuclear engineering).

Let me explain it thus: whatever we can accomplish, industrial espionage and "blackhat" reverse engineering can do better. I'm trying to support the community in as ethical manner as I can. Zero cannot prevent data exfiltration, but it can make its customers experiences with these motorcycles more difficult.

I am definitely interested in the right to repair as it applies to EVs, and in fact this is one reason I selected and prefer Zero. I may have to vocally renounce my support of Zero and take a different position with regards to them in order to serve the community. This community role is already an unpaid part-time job, and I tire of compensating for Zero's lack of constructive outreach.

[BrianTRice@gmail.com]

For what it's worth, I have seen decoded SR/F logs, and have examined the binary files. The messages in the logs are just strings, and the log entries are delimited in a funny way but they're not encrypted.

The level of work required to decode logs does not seem to constitute a DMCA violation as such but does require determining a "data dictionary" of the values stored in the header and in the records. As such, any professional reverse engineering effort engaged for industrial espionage will simply disassemble the firmware and simulate/replay CANbus data or operate the bike in a controlled environment to work out the decoding.

What they've done is raise the expense of engaging in this effort, which is nullified the moment the dictionary is filled in for an accessible piece of software. This penalizes the owner (and service technicians not within Zero's network) without impacting competitors.

[Crissa]

Security by obscurity is not security.

-Crissa