The Price Nobody Publishes
Short answer: Yes, it is normal, and no, nobody is required to publish it. In the two manufacturer collision programmes whose full terms this project has read, the duties a certified shop must meet are published in detail at open web addresses, while the labour rate the manufacturer pays, the capital cost of the equipment it mandates, and the score that counts as passing its audit appear nowhere.
What is actually public
Tesla posts a fourteen page document called the Tesla Approved Collision Center Operating Standards at a public path on its service website. Every page of it carries the word "Confidential". We read all fourteen pages on 2026-09-05 over a fetcher that returns page text without summarising it.
That document quantifies a great deal. It sets a 95 percent customer satisfaction minimum, an eleven day maximum average cycle time, a maximum of two parts orders per VIN, a 25 percent minimum state of charge for cars in the shop's care, four hours of hands-on work per vehicle per calendar day, a 24 hour deadline for answering Tesla, a customer update every three days, thirty days to meet all standards after acceptance, a two year review cycle, a complete dismantle before the second parts order, and a one to five star rating that determines who gets referred work. It contains no dollar figure of any kind. [COMPANY]
American Honda publishes its programme terms as a PDF on the Honda and Acura Certified Collision site, and that document does carry prices:
"The initial participation fee for the Program (the "Participation Fee") is $3,300 for the Shop's first year in the Program, due and payable at a specified time prior to beginning the Shop's first certification process."
"Subsequently, upon invitation by American Honda to recertify for an additional year, the Participation Fee is $3,300."
"Failure to return the Program plaque(s) within 30 days will result in a penalty fee of $500 per item."
Read the published numbers across both programmes and they all point the same way. Each one is either money moving from the shop to the programme owner, or a minimum the shop has to hit. The nearest thing to a figure describing what the shop receives is Tesla's parts arrangement, under which a shop "may re-bill discounted parts back to Tesla at rate that is 10% higher than the discounted price that TACC paid, thereby realizing a 10% margin on those parts." That is a set margin on parts. It says nothing about labour. [COMPANY]
The three figures that decide whether it pays
The labour rate. Tesla's published standards name the document that sets it, and do not contain it:
"The labor rates for all Tesla-paid work for body, paint, structural, and mechanical work is set forth in the TACC's Rate Addendum. Any charge that exceeds the rates set forth in the Rate Addendum will be considered grounds for removal from the TACC program."
The Rate Addendum is an addendum to the General Terms and Conditions for Collision Services, and the standards document is explicit that the standards are not the contract: "The working partnership is defined by the GTC between Tesla and the TACC. The GTC (including its Addenda) is a legal and binding contract." Neither the GTC nor its addenda is published anywhere we could find. What is posted at the public address, and what every secondhand account of this programme therefore describes, is the standards. [COMPANY]
The capital cost. Honda specifies required equipment down to named welding wire and named scanning software and puts no price against any of it. Tesla points its shops at a tooling list held elsewhere on its service site, and makes a claim about price in place of a price:
"Tesla's intent is to facilitate affordable compliance with the mandates required to properly repair its vehicles. For this reason, Tesla negotiates with equipment manufacturers to provide equipment directly to TACC, at the lowest price negotiable, with no margin for Tesla."
That is the strongest sentence either manufacturer has on this subject, and it is worth taking seriously as a statement of intent. It is also untestable from outside, for the same reason everything else here is: there is no published figure on either side of it. [COMPANY]
The pass mark. Honda's certification audit is published in full as numbered yes-or-no items grouped into categories, with no threshold stated for passing. Tesla's document says only that "Tesla supplies certification plaques only after the TACC has successfully passed a full audit." There is an audit and there is a pass, and no published standard for what passing means. Termination in Honda's contract is triggered by a list of occurrences "as determined by American Honda in its sole discretion", including customer satisfaction being "consistently below acceptable standards". [COMPANY]
The order of the steps is the mechanism
Tesla publishes its own onboarding sequence, and the order repays reading:
"a. Sign and return the Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) b. Sign and return the GTC c. Complete a physical facility virtual tour d. Pay Program Fee and training fees e. Purchase required tooling f. Complete Tesla training g. Pass a site validation demonstrating ownership of all required tooling and equipment listed in the Tesla tooling list h. Receive Electronic Parts Catalog access i. Begin having work referred from Tesla"
Confidentiality is step one, before the contract and before any money changes hands. A Program Fee and training fees are named at step d, and neither amount is published; Honda publishes the equivalent number and Tesla does not.
Notice also what this sequence does not show. The contract is signed at step b, before the fees at step d and the tooling at step e. Whether the Rate Addendum is populated and delivered at that point, the sequence does not say, and no copy has been seen, so we cannot say what a shop knows about its own rate before it spends.
Whatever the shop that signs is told, these figures are unavailable to the next shop deciding whether to spend, to every other certified shop, to the insurer being asked to pay for certified work, and to the car owner to whom the certification is advertised. What the documents establish is non-publication and, in Tesla's case, an NDA at step a. They do not establish whom the non-publication is aimed at.
That matters for how the grading works. Tesla scores every certified shop against published criteria, of which cost is one, and the cost criteria are "a. Customer survey b. Competitive rates c. Insurer feedback". Work is then allocated by score: "Tesla will refer work to TACC based upon the 1-5 star rating (highest first) and other considerations." A shop is graded on whether its rates are competitive, in a market where no rate is published for it to be competitive against. [COMPANY]
"Fair and reasonable" is defined, and the definition stops at the tailpipe
This is the part where our own starting assumption was wrong, and correcting it made the finding sharper.
In July 2023 the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the Automotive Service Association and the Society of Collision Repair Specialists signed a commitment on repair data sharing. The only price term in the document, on a full read of it on 2026-09-05, reads in full:
"Fair and Reasonable Terms - There shall be access to diagnostic and repair information and tools on fair and reasonable terms, consistent with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, California Air Resources Board, and Massachusetts statutory requirements."
We took that phrase to be empty everywhere. EPA has in fact written down what a fair and reasonable price means, at 40 CFR 86.1808-01(f)(7)(i): "All information required to be made available by this section shall be made available at a fair and reasonable price", followed by eight lettered criteria that include "(C) The price charged by other manufacturers for similar information" and, remarkably, "(E) The ability of aftermarket technicians or shops to afford the information." [STATUTE, confirmed on eCFR and on Cornell LII, 2026-09-05]
California's Air Resources Board has a comparable pricing provision for emission-related service information and diagnostic tools at 13 CCR 1969. We read it on one host only, so this page neither quotes it nor claims that its wording or its criteria match the EPA rule's. [STATUTE, one host only: Cornell LII, 2026-09-05, not confirmed]
Massachusetts, the third authority the commitment names, uses "upon fair and reasonable terms" more than once in M.G.L. c. 93K s.2 and supplies no definition of it. [STATUTE, confirmed on malegislature.gov and on Justia, 2026-09-05]
So the criteria exist.
They attach to emission-related service information, and a labour rate for collision work is not that. The collision programmes inherit the phrase and none of its content. As for the body that signed the commitment carrying the phrase, its enforcement arm is a panel that "shall meet, at a minimum, biannually", and the document contains no remedy, arbitration, damages or termination provision of any kind.
The case on the other side, which is strong
No supplier publishes its customer rate sheets, and a manufacturer that posted the rates it pays every shop in the country would have created a public price signal among competitors, which is the fact pattern antitrust lawyers worry about most. Honda does not set the prices of the equipment it specifies, which is made and discounted by third-party vendors; publishing the specification and letting the shop get quotes is arguably the honest option. Unpublished pass marks are ordinary quality practice, because a published threshold is a threshold shops manage to. And nobody is compelled to join: a certification programme is a commercial arrangement between two businesses, and being told the price when you start negotiating is negotiation.
What survives that case is narrower than the headline. The confidentiality in these two programmes runs one way. One party publishes the entire obligation at length at an open URL and withholds only the number that prices it. We have not surveyed commercial confidentiality practice, so we put it no more strongly than that. The published half recruits shops and reassures consumers. The withheld half decides whether the recruit makes money.
There is one more feature worth naming. The asset a shop buys with that unpublished capital cost is a certification that can be withdrawn at the programme owner's discretion, and Honda's contract states that the shop's recovery from Honda, expressly including for fraud and misrepresentation, is limited to "THE TOTAL AMOUNT PAID BY THE SHOP TO AMERICAN HONDA DURING THE TWELVE (12) MONTHS PRECEDING THE DATE THE CLAIM AROSE." That is what the clause says. Whether a cap drawn that way would be enforced, and whether it has ever been invoked against anyone, is not something this page can show. What the clause does on its face is measure the ceiling on the shop's claim by what the shop has already paid American Honda, so the shop's own spending sets the limit of its own remedy. A $500 plaque penalty, if one were ever charged, would be such a payment, and we know of no instance of one being charged.
What we could not verify
We are not claiming that any withheld number is a bad number. No Rate Addendum was obtained by anyone on this project. Nothing here shows Tesla's labour rates are low or Honda's equipment burden heavy relative to the work certification wins. The finding is about who is permitted to see the figure.
We do not claim this describes OEM certification programmes as a class. We have read the full terms of two: Tesla's and American Honda's. Other programmes are untested here, and one shop-facing agreement could not be obtained at all because the site no longer serves it.
Further limits, stated plainly. Whether Tesla publishes prices for the tooling it requires is unknown to us; that list lives elsewhere on Tesla's service site and we did not open it this pass, so the capital-cost finding is established for Honda and untested for Tesla. We do not know what form the Rate Addendum takes, or whether it states a number at all, because no copy has been seen. This page makes no claim that the two manufacturers coordinated anything; two companies doing the same thing is a pattern and not an agreement, and nothing here suggests either is unlawful. We could not confirm the California regulation on a second independent host, which is why the sentence citing it carries a single-host tag where it is made and compares its wording to nothing. We did not obtain a verbatim scope-limiting sentence from the EPA rule, and we did not re-open Honda's equipment list or audit sheet on this pass, so the item counts and category counts from earlier reads are not repeated here.
What you can actually do
If your car is at a certified shop, the certification is real evidence that the shop holds specified tools and training, and it is not a promise to you from the manufacturer; Honda's own contract tells its certified shops that they must not "state, suggest or imply to customers or others that American Honda warrants or assumes any responsibility for any such repairs, services and other work." If you run a shop weighing a programme, ask for the rate schedule and the audit threshold in writing before you buy the bench, and read the liability cap and termination clauses as carefully as the fee. There is no regulator you can ask for these figures and no filing where they appear, and we would be misleading you to suggest otherwise.
Corrections
- An earlier draft described 13 CCR 1969 as defining the phrase in materially the same terms as the EPA rule. That comparison rested on a single host and has been withdrawn, and the sentence now carries its single-host tag at the point of use rather than only in the source list. ARB's own Final Regulation Order for the 2022 amendments to section 1969 appears to use a different defined term, "fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory price". That document has not been read in full by this project and no claim is made from it here.
- An earlier draft said the figures were kept from the next shop, from insurers and from car owners. The documents establish non-publication, and in Tesla's case an NDA binding the shop. They do not establish whom the non-publication is aimed at, and the sentence has been narrowed to say so.
- An earlier draft said a shop that reads what it signs sees its own rate schedule before it spends. The onboarding sequence establishes when the contract is signed, not when the Rate Addendum is populated or delivered, and the page elsewhere states that no copy of that addendum has been seen. The claim has been withdrawn.
- An earlier draft gave a category count for Honda's certification audit, which contradicted this page's own statement that counts from earlier reads are not repeated. The count has been removed. The same draft named three equipment vendors and an unsourced count of others, from the same un-reopened document; those have been removed too.
- An earlier draft said Honda's contract caps what a shop can ever recover. The page now reports what the clause states and declines the separate questions of whether such a cap would be enforced and whether it has ever been invoked.
- An earlier draft called the $500 plaque penalty a compounding asymmetry. A payment to American Honda raises the cap rather than lowering it, so the characterisation ran the wrong way and has been removed.
- An earlier draft compared the confidentiality in these programmes to ordinary commercial confidentiality generally. No survey of commercial practice was done, and the comparison has been narrowed to what the two sets of terms show.
- An earlier draft said the commitment's "only price term" without stating how that was tested. The page now records that the claim rests on a full read of the document on 2026-09-05.
- An earlier internal note recorded the phrase "upon fair and reasonable terms" as appearing three times in M.G.L. c. 93K s.2. Two independent hosts read on 2026-09-05 both returned four occurrences. This page therefore states that the phrase appears more than once rather than giving a count.
- An earlier note treated Honda's $3,300 fee as the value of Honda's liability cap. The cap is instead a formula whose input is the shop's total payments to American Honda in the preceding twelve months, and that phrase is not a defined term in the contract.
- Quotations are reproduced in ASCII. Where the source used typographic dashes or curly quotation marks, plain equivalents appear here; no words have been changed.
- Corrections to this page are welcome and will be logged in this section.
Sources
- Tesla Approved Collision Center Operating Standards, last updated 9/17/2024, https://service.tesla.com/docs/Public/TeslaApprovedCollisionCenters/Tesla_Body_Repair_Program_Operating_Standards.pdf (full fourteen pages read on 2026-09-05)
- American Honda Motor Co., Inc., Honda and Acura Certified Collision Program Terms and Conditions, 02012025, https://www.hondaandacuracertifiedcollision.com/Content/downloads/HondaandAcura%20TC%2002012025.pdf (read on 2026-09-05)
- Automotive Repair Data Sharing Commitment, July 2023, Alliance for Automotive Innovation copy, https://www.autosinnovate.org/about/advocacy/right-to-repair/1%20-%20National%20Automotive%20Repair%20Data%20Sharing%20Commitment%20July%202023.pdf (read in full on 2026-09-05)
- 40 CFR 86.1808-01, eCFR, https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-40/chapter-I/subchapter-C/part-86/subpart-S/section-86.1808-01 (read on 2026-09-05) and Cornell Legal Information Institute, https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/40/86.1808-01 (read on 2026-09-05). Both hosts returned the quoted sentence and criteria (A) through (H) identically.
- M.G.L. c. 93K s.2, https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleXV/Chapter93K/Section2 (read on 2026-09-05) and Justia, https://law.justia.com/codes/massachusetts/part-i/title-xv/chapter-93k/section-2/ (read on 2026-09-05). Both hosts returned the phrase and both returned no definition of it.
- 13 CCR 1969, Cornell Legal Information Institute, https://www.law.cornell.edu/regulations/california/13-CCR-1969 (read on 2026-09-05). One host only. The sentence citing it is tagged as unconfirmed where it appears, and this page makes no comparison between its wording and the EPA rule's.
General consumer information: not legal, insurance, or financial advice. Requirements, coverage, and practices vary by state, policy, and manufacturer.