That's a great question. Thank you very much.
As I alluded to in my original presentation, the car as it is today is evolving. How it's going to be owned and operated is going to change dramatically. I used the term “telematics” to refer to the disrupter in what's coming.
To answer your question specifically, we have to be prepared to service vehicles properly over their whole lifespan. As I pointed out, the lifespan of vehicles is increasing. We're building better vehicles. They're lasting longer. The capacity to service these vehicles....
You alluded to rural areas. The ability to service vehicles effectively coast to coast relies on the capacity of a technician, a service provider anywhere in Canada, to properly assess the condition of the vehicle, see what needs to be repaired, and perform the proper repair so that the vehicle continues to be safe.
The dynamic that plays out today, and hence the whole right-to-repair fight we had about eight years, is to ensure that not just the people who build the car and the people who sell the car through the dealership are able to access that information. It has to be the entire aftermarket. The key here is access to information and ensuring that vehicles, as they evolve over time, continue to provide access.
Today, essentially, when you drive your vehicle into a service bay, a technician will physically connect to the vehicle to get diagnostic information, programming information, and so on. As the vehicle evolves and telematics happen, the vehicle sends information dynamically over the air. A technician is no longer required to connect directly to the vehicle to gain that information.
As that information now goes into the cloud, for lack of a better word, it gets wirelessly connected. How the data gets directed to a service provider becomes the big question. This answers our concerns. As the way the vehicles communicate changes, we want to ensure that owners of vehicles.... Also, the ownership model might change, but we want to ensure that whoever has the ownership of the vehicle will have ownership of the data generated by the vehicle and will be able to direct that information to their service provider of choice, essentially allowing Canadians to make the right choices in who they want to service their vehicle and ensuring that the people who provide the service will have the right information so that we are able to repair these vehicles safely.
Let me add one more aspect that you pointed out. Today there is a broad network of dealerships, but they do not service all Canadians in all the rural areas. The aftermarket does. We are in every community across the country. For this aftermarket to continue to repair those vehicles, access to information is key.
Our action is to be here and to educate the government that access to information is key, ownership of that data by the car owner is key, and the capacity of that car owner to direct the information to whoever they want is also key.