Hey, everyone. For me, I'm hoping that at some point in time you guys use one of our services or franchisees from Fix Auto, ProColor or Speedy Auto Service.
On the automotive perspective, for us, when I hear everyone talking about the competition and small business, we're a franchise system. We represent small and medium-sized businesses. I'm one of the big believers. For me, I started with one garage. Obviously, I've grown it now to the point where we have over 2,000 locations, but mainly franchises.
For us, on the right to repair, as you call it, from 12 years ago, we didn't have connected cars like we have today. If you can imagine, these cars are connected. It touches on more than just the right to repair the vehicle. Also, if everyone can imagine, the ecosystem touches so much more. On the collision side, if you get in a car accident, the data from when you were in the car accident, all the way back to the insurance company, the whole ecosystem's being digitized. The right to repair information of this vehicle becomes critical, not for just repairing the vehicle. It actually comes from the insurance companies on how they regulate for insurance premiums. Also, at that point, the OEs are the gatekeepers of all this data. If I can't fix the car, I don't own the data and the customer doesn't know what data we're capturing on him. You're turning over a lot of what I call knowledge and power of that data.
Data today is like the new oil in our industry. The data they want to capture is worth a lot of money. If we as a government leave it so open-ended, not just on the ability to fix a car.... You can imagine that everyone's familiar with some of these progressive OEs. The CASIS old agreement only involves the traditional manufacturers, but you have companies like Rivian or Tesla. They're connected cars. They're electric vehicles. If I have a Tesla up in Thunder Bay and I get into a car accident, for example, am I going to tow it all the way to Toronto to get it fixed? At the end, premiums go up and then that affects every single consumer paying for that non-ability to get the data. These cars are connected. You can't fix it. They can actually update software and do things without our even knowing.
I think the whole ecosystem on the connected vehicle, the mobility of a car, is something that created a new ecosystem that I think the Competition Act and certain things don't look at to make sure it's fair for everyone and that we have fair competition for everyone to access the ability to train to repair these vehicles. If we can't get access to the information, it's going to be hard for us to fix.