The Resistance
Manifesto

The practice of engineering products to fail on a schedule is not an accident of market forces. It is a deliberate design decision, made in boardrooms, implemented by engineers who are told it is normal, and defended with the language of "product refresh cycles" and "innovation." It is fraud with better PR.

We have seen the failure mode specifications. We have been in the rooms where the question "how do we make the 2019 version feel obsolete by 2022?" is treated as a legitimate engineering brief. We will not do this.

Every Resistance Motors vehicle is designed with a ten-year operational lifespan as the baseline, not the ceiling. This means we use component grades specified for durability, not the cheapest part that will survive the warranty period. It means our battery management software is written to maximise cycle life, not to demonstrate range figures in controlled testing conditions. It means we will never push a software update that degrades the performance of an older vehicle to make a newer model look comparatively better.

It also means something more uncomfortable: we will cannibalise our own sales. A customer who buys a Fault Line and drives it for twelve years is not buying a replacement in year four. We accept this. A business model built on durability is harder than one built on planned failure, but it is the only one we can defend.

We commit to publishing all known hardware end-of-life dates at point of sale. If a component has a realistic service life of seven years under normal conditions, you will know that before you buy. No surprises.

Modern vehicles are surveillance infrastructure. This is not a conspiracy — it is documented in the privacy policies of every major manufacturer, written in language specifically designed to prevent the average person from understanding what they are agreeing to. Your car knows where you go, how fast you drive, how hard you brake, when you leave home in the morning and when you return at night. This data is sold. It is sold to insurance companies, to data brokers, to advertisers, and to governments. The car you paid for is also a product being sold — and you are not the customer, you are the inventory.

Resistance Motors vehicles do not collect behavioural telemetry for commercial purposes. Full stop.

We collect only the data necessary for the vehicle to function: battery state, error codes for diagnostic purposes, and — with your explicit, individual, revocable consent — location data for breakdown and roadside assistance. That's it. None of this data is sold, licensed, or shared with third parties. None of it is held beyond its functional purpose. You can request deletion of all data associated with your vehicle at any time, and it will be deleted within 72 hours.

Our software is open-source. The update packages we deliver over Wi-Fi can be inspected by anyone with the technical capability to do so. We publish the update changelogs in full. We do not have hidden modules. If you find one, tell us. We will fix it and we will apologise publicly.

We are aware that this position costs us money. Data is worth something, and we are deliberately leaving that value on the table. We are also aware that some of our competitors use data revenue to subsidise vehicle prices, and that our refusal to do so means we cannot match those subsidised prices. This is the correct trade-off.

The automotive industry operates on a principle of deliberate opacity. Manufacturers do not publish their build costs. Dealers do not disclose their margins. Finance products are structured to obscure the real cost of borrowing. Optional extras are priced at ten to twenty times their manufacturing cost. Features that exist in the vehicle hardware are locked behind software subscriptions. This is not capitalism functioning as designed — it is an industry that has collectively decided its customers are marks to be extracted from.

We publish our cost breakdowns for every vehicle we sell. You can find them on the product pages on this website. Battery cost, drivetrain cost, materials, labour, logistics, and our declared margin. These figures are audited annually by a third party. If our margins change significantly, we explain why.

Our declared margins are modest by industry standards — between 8% and 11% depending on the vehicle. We are not a charity. We need to generate surplus to fund the racing programme, to invest in next-generation battery research, and to build reserves that protect the jobs of the people who work here. But we will not charge you more than what the vehicle costs to build, plus a margin we are willing to name in public.

We do not use dealers. The dealer model adds between 8% and 15% to the cost of a vehicle in the form of showroom margin, finance kickbacks, and administrative overhead that provides no value to the buyer. We deliver direct. You buy from us. The price you see is the price you pay, and VAT is always included in the figure we quote.

We do not offer optional extras that should be standard equipment. Every vehicle leaves our facility with the safety systems, comfort equipment, and software features that are appropriate to its class. We will not charge you to unlock seat heating that the hardware already supports. We will not sell you a driver assistance package as an add-on when the sensors are already installed. Features that exist in the car are available in the car.

The right to repair your own property is fundamental. The automotive industry — including the EV sector — has spent fifteen years systematically undermining this right through software locks, proprietary diagnostic interfaces, encrypted ECU architectures, and dealer-only service portals. The effect is that vehicles which could be maintained by any competent mechanic are instead captured in manufacturer service networks with artificially inflated labour rates and parts markups.

All Resistance Motors service documentation is publicly available, free of charge, on our repair portal. This includes full workshop manuals, wiring diagrams, torque specifications, component removal and installation procedures, and battery system safety protocols. We do not require a dealer account to access them. We do not charge a subscription fee. The documents are licensed under Creative Commons and can be downloaded, reproduced, and shared.

Our vehicles use standard OBD-II diagnostic interfaces. Any off-the-shelf scan tool will communicate with the base diagnostic layer. We publish extended diagnostic codes beyond the OBD-II standard on our repair portal, free of charge. We do not cryptographically lock the ECU to prevent independent flashing. We do not void warranties on the basis of independent servicing — we void warranties on the basis of negligent work, which is a reasonable and different thing.

We stock all service parts for a minimum of fifteen years after a model is discontinued. We sell parts directly to individuals and independent workshops at the same price. We do not operate a tiered parts pricing system that charges independent garages more than dealer networks.

We recognise that open repair documentation carries some risk — it is easier to perform unsafe battery work if you have access to battery disassembly procedures. We address this through safety notices, not through restriction. Treating adults as incapable of reading a warning and acting accordingly is not a safety policy, it is a business strategy.

Fifteen percent of Resistance Motors Ltd. is owned by the Resistance Motors Staff Cooperative — a formal cooperative structure through which employees hold equity in the company. This is not a share option scheme designed to vest at an IPO. It is direct, collective ownership that grows as the company grows and entitles workers to a proportional share of profit distributions.

We chose this structure because we believe that the people who make the thing should have a stake in it. Not because it is good PR — cooperative ownership is not, in our experience, good PR; it is complicated, slow, and frequently inconvenient for management — but because it is the correct way to organise a company that asks people to invest their working lives in it.

The cooperative's ownership stake cannot be diluted below 15% by any future funding round or restructuring without a formal vote by the cooperative membership. This is written into our articles of association. It cannot be altered by the founding partners unilaterally. The lawyers told us this was unusual. We told them it was intentional.

We also commit to wage transparency. All pay bands within the company are published internally and available to any employee. The ratio between the lowest-paid full-time employee and the highest-paid member of the leadership team is capped, in our articles of association, at 1:8. The CEO of Resistance Motors does not earn more than eight times what the person cleaning our factory floor earns. This is not a sacrifice on the part of leadership — it is a design decision about the kind of company we intend to be.

We are a small company. We do not have the scale to single-handedly restructure the labour relations of the automotive sector. What we have is a proof of concept: that a company building physical products in a high-cost country, paying honest wages, with worker ownership and transparent pay ratios, can build vehicles that compete on quality and integrity if not always on price. We intend to demonstrate this for as long as we exist.

We are not naive about the scale of what needs to change. One worker-owned cooperative in Salford building three hundred performance cars a year and a few thousand city EVs is not going to transform the automotive industry. We know this.

What we can do is demonstrate, concretely, that the trade-offs the industry claims are necessary — between quality and durability, between profitability and transparency, between growth and worker ownership — are not trade-offs at all. They are choices. The industry makes these choices because extraction is more profitable than integrity in the short term. We are making different choices and publishing the results.

In the medium term, our goals are practical: expand the Fault Line subscription programme to enable EV access for lower-income households who cannot afford upfront purchase. Develop the Undertow's recycled material programme toward 60% post-consumer content by 2028. Transition 100% of our assembly facility to renewable energy. Reach a workforce of 500 people, all on the cooperative ownership model.

In the longer term, we want to help build an industry-wide movement toward right-to-repair legislation, transparent pricing, and data ownership standards. We will publish our research, our build methodologies, and our organisational models freely. If a competitor uses something we've developed to build a better, more ethical product, that is not a threat to us. It is the point.

The car industry has had fifty years to sort itself out. It has chosen surveillance, extraction, and obsolescence at every turn. We are not interested in reforming it from the inside. We are interested in being the alternative that makes the old model look indefensible.

Drive against the machine.