89th Session Wrap-up: Texas lawmakers pass first Right to Repair bill in red state, other priorities unsuccessful

By Terri Hall
Founder/Executive Director
Texans Uniting for Reform & Freedom (TURF) &
Texans for Toll-free Highways

While we headed into session with the wind at our backs having achieved a call to abolish all toll roads in the Republican Party of Texas (RPT) Platform and getting three pro-driver initiatives added to the official RPT Legislative Priorities, what we got in the end was one out of those three official priorities. 

What was it? The first ever Right to Repair bill — HB 2963 by Giovanni Capriglione (and SB 2428 by Senator Bob Hall in the Senate) — to become law in a red state. It’s YUGE when it comes to protecting drivers from dealer and manufacturer monopolies that force us to pay outlandish prices to repair or obtain replacement parts for our cars (which explodes the cost of car ownership). While it wasn’t our preferred bill (there was a stronger one authored by Rep. Pat Curry, HB 4555 and Senator Hall, SB 2748, that failed to get a hearing), it is a MAJOR step in the right direction and puts manufacturers on notice that the America First agenda includes making driving affordable again!

The other two official transportation-related RPT priorities listed under Ending Federal Overreach (priority #8) were ending road diets and protecting Texas drivers from the remote kill switch mandated to go into all vehicles starting next year. The bill to end road diets, HB 4348, also authored by Capriglione and Hall in the Senate, got a last minute hearing in the House and even made it onto the final House calendar, but failed to pass in time as the clock ran out. What is a road diet? Anti-car policies being adopted in many Texas cities that remove or shrink the lanes available to cars and repurpose them as bus or bike only lanes and/or sidewalks. 

It often also involves installing buffers like protruding curbs and sidewalks, artificially lowering speed limits and generally putting up interference for drivers that intentionally create congestion, road delay, and frustration — reducing quality of life. Meanwhile, transit ridership has fallen and failed to bounce back from pre-pandemic levels, despite all the gimmicks by cities to increase transit use. Roads diets have not pushed people out of their cars and into transit as advertised, rather, congestion and vehicle registrations have increased in Texas, while transit ridership continues to plummet. We’re nowhere near finished with this priority — Texans want congestion relief, not intentionally creating more of it with less efficient roads.

The Biden Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) includes a mandate to install a remote kill switch in all cars after 2026. The rule published by the U.S. Department of Transportation would allow the government to passively monitor your driving at all times, including with interior cameras on the driver to monitor eye movements, lane monitoring, as well as monitoring the air inside your car, presumably to detect ‘impairment’, then cut power to your car if it thinks you’re ‘impaired’ in some way. It’s a dangerous, unconstitutional, big government surveillance state in your car. The RPT Platform Plank #49 also urges swift action by the legislature to protect Texas drivers from vehicles with remote kill switches in them.

SB 381 by Senator Mayes Middleton and HB 2547 by Rep. Briscoe Cain would have prevented the sale of vehicles with remote kill switches in the Lone Star State. Dealers who violated the law would be subject to losing their license to sell vehicles in Texas. In a different bill by Rep. Nate Schatzline, HB 1074 dubbed the ‘Right to Drive Act,’ it included protection from vehicles with a remote kill switch, the right to own a gas-powered car, and the right to drive in a vehicle with human decision-making (vs being forced into autonomous vehicle). None of these bills even got a hearing, despite the massive party and grassroots support behind them. A separate bill by Curry, HB 2440, prohibiting government from banning vehicles based on fuel type did successfully pass. That’s welcome news for Texas drivers! Since then, President Donald Trump has successfully ended the EV mandates nationally. 

89th Session Wrap-Up:

• Texas lawmakers pass first Right to Repair bill in red state, other priorities unsuccessful (Fail to pass toll relief, Do not stop the kill switch, or road diets in Texas)
• No progress curbing tolls, but expansion stymied by grassroots
• BRAVE NEW WORLD: Driverless Autonomous Vehicles unleashed in Texas