Time to make a billion dollars on something else, then start up a car company designed to fail. No investors, design a car for a 60-70k buying price, few bells and whistles, but built to last indefinitely with basic maintenance. Start the company planning to practically close it down just after the last preorder customer has their car delivered and become a maintenance company with a few employees to make replacement parts and install them. If demand rises, redesign for the new times, ramp up and do it all again.

I haven’t even read the article yet, and my cynical ass came to the same conclusion based on the headline. 😣

Competition, in theory, should combat this. It does, but it should.

Cars do have failure modes other than rust, like crashes. Having not yet read the article, I expect crashes still destroy cars.

Edit: having read the article, it was not a dense technical work and was disappointing on specifics.

Makes sense. That is why all those Japanese carmakers went bankrupt and diesal hasn’t been a thing since the 1950s.

Batteries can be replaced. An EV that could run 1 million miles would still need maintenance - I think the point is that they could be designed to last.

Planned obsolescence is so wide spread we don’t even notice it, but lots of products are designed to fail either through cheaper components or deliberately flawed design. That means we have to go and buy a replacement. It is also generally cheaper.

So we either have cheap products that will break or seemingly expensive products but they last for a very long time. But in the long run the cheap products generally cost you more to buy than one expensive product.

Yes, the batteries would need to be replaced but that means designing them to be replaced.

Unlike the Tesla model Y which built the battery into the frame and filled it with foam so that it absolutely cannot get replaced. Musk said the way to replace the battery is to send the entire car to the scrap yard and recover the lithium from the shredder.

I’m sure if we spend enough time working on it, we can figure out how this is all OPEC’s fault. /s (jeeze tho I hope your friend was okay!)

What was the issue? Do you know?

“landed”?

Goddamn planned obsolescence.

Sad to see an i5 in that condition :(

Lemmy: Capitalism caused this.

In a socialist system cars would be tree proof.

damn wild trees crossing street

Will use 4x as much electricity though, ugh.

cleanenergyresourceteams.org/your-old-refrigerato…

Anyone know of any refrigerators today that are as durable as older ones and have today’s efficiencies, but without the smart features and other junk?

Average refrigerator today still lasts 13 years though, and while they’re made cheaply they also are cheaper (at least as a portion percentage of the average paycheck).

…usatoday.com/…/ask-the-experts-why-dont-new-home…

My grandparents had one of those old locking fridges from the 50s or so. It weighed like a metric ton, but that fucker NEVER broke.

I haven’t looked at the statistical data on this myself, but there’s something to be said for survivorship bias.

Can confirm. Use a fridge from 1974. 2 years ago thermostat failed. Replaced with digital one for $15. Now have a nice digital readout of the temps. Thing uses 180W 100W when running, less than bigger newer ones.
It’s even more ecological to keep it running since it still has the nasty ozone layer killing coolant that would partly evaporate when trashing it.

EDIT: 100W just checked the type plate.

I mean…they can, you just refresh the motor. Tons of ICE vehicles out there with 400-500k miles on them. Hell most semi trucks have millions of miles on them.

A rebuild every x00,000 miles on a Toyota sounds nicer than paying the price of a new pilot every 100,000 miles tbh. Computers don’t last though and emissions have made it a huge pain to fix on older cars. Nothing against emissions it’s a necessary evil.

If they’re easy enough to work on, and the parts market is maintained, yes.

Nothing lasts forever without something going wrong, but we can make it easier to fix. It’s a little more true of EVs, because they’re mechanically simpler than ICE cars. You added an electric motor (which lasts forever if designed well), batteries (life dependent on the chemistry involved), and some electronics to drive that (caps in there go bad, much of the rest will last forever if not abused). You took away an ICE, an intake system, an exhaust system, perhaps some forced induction, a coolant system (which you might have on EVs, but not to the same level), an ignition system, a shitload of sensors (O2 sensors having particularly short life, relatively speaking), and a fuel pump.

If designed to be worked on, the EV is far, far easier.

I am thinking of doing that when my civic should be legally declared dead. With the insanity that is new car prices and insurance for new cars plus the vanished used car market it just isn’t worth it. I want an EV but things have to go back to normal before that happens

They will if they are forced by regulation : 10y mandatory warrantee, right to repair, standardized swappable batteries, spare parts production for 20y…

but we need politics who set up such regulations

Imagine being able to opt into an long term support branch when you feel your phone starting to lag, unlocked bootloader’s, and have user replaceable batteries.

Still mad about accidentally installing the newer version of iOS on my iPad pro. Such a meaningful feature to have security patches without slowdown from newer versions.

They don’t?

What are you even doing, throwing your phone on the ground? How does your phone not last that long

I’m still using my OnePlus 8t. Phones lifespans are fine. If you can’t keep your phone working for 4 years, that’s on you.

I see no reason to upgrade until support is dropped.

iPhones tend to last 5 or so years for me…

Wait, are you saying my phone should last less time than it does?

My current phone is from 2017.

I just got a new phone despite my previous one being totally fine because it’s no longer getting security updates. I’ve had it for ~4 years with no issues, so I got a Pixel for longer security updates.

So yeah, they totally could last longer if they kept supporting them.

The problem with LEDs isn’t the bit that emits lights. It’s the power supply, specifically the electrolytic capacitors. Good designs either use higher quality caps, or use designs that avoid electrolytic caps altogether. Either one takes a bit more money, but the market is always in a race to the bottom.

Long term, I think we should be avoiding traditional light fixtures entirely. It’s better to have a lot of little lights spread over an area rather than a few point sources in the room. That gives us the opportunity to separate the power supply from the lights entirely, like LED strips do.

Good ones still last a long time. What fails is generally not the LED itself but the cheap-ass rectifier in a cheap-ass case that is optimised for production price instead of heat dissipation. The fixture can also be an issue as nobody designed for heat dissipation in the days of incandescent bulbs, you might be baking those poor capacitors.

And those kinds of bulbs will stay available because there’s plenty of commercial users doing their due diligence on life-time costs. Washing machines, fridges? Yes, those too, though commercial ones aren’t necessarily cheap. Want a solid pair of pants? Ask a construction crew what they’re wearing.

Please elaborate on the iTrash slowdown thing. I have an idea of what you’re referring to but want to make sure I’m right.

Gonna downvote you here bröder and chip in with the people defending Apple’s products while recognizing that Apple did go through a lawsuit and that they did indeed participate in this shady-ass practice. Whether they still do - who knows, we live in a funny age.

From personal experience, not only is the build quality superior but they do last pretty long. I’ve got 3 devices personally and have had experience with many more.

My SE that’s old as hell now. I’m not gonna say it runs every app just fine, but the OS functions just fine. I use it as a music player now tho and iPhone 14 as my phone.

SE2 was shit, I’ll admit.

I bought M1 Air when they just came out - it has barely slowed down. Admittedly, it was after my 12 year old Acer plastic clunker decided to not wake up one day.

I also just recently used a friend’s pretty ancient iPad for Procreate and that worked just fine as well.

If someone’s looking for great UI/UX out of the box and great industrial design, what other alternatives are there besides Apple? At least for smartphones there are none. If someone did put a really nice feeling (physically) smartphone in front of me and said: “hey, you can switch everything off with hardware switches and all the apps you’re used to are supported plus the UI and the camera is competent”, I might jump, maybe. Depending on how I could manage my workflow with Linux bc I’m not going to Windows and in this hypothetical scenario if I’m jumping Apple, I’m jumping everything not just the phone.

All that said, I have been giving a thought to all of this for some time and as soon as the time is right for me, I will switch, out of principle. I would love to be able to run some other OS on Apple phone hardware tho.

Back in the day you could buy whole (but small) parts, cut away the rusy one and solder in the new one (paint with anti rust paint). Did it on my cheap ass volvo 142 :-)

Maybe you can’t do that any more because of complex crumple zones, but I bet we can do better. A car shouldn’t just have a life span of 6-10 years.

Climate change is getting rid of snow. No more salted roads. Cars will last forever

So much so that TFLClassics on YouTube in Colorado bought a well maintained model T and drove it to the nearest dealership and had mechanics there change the oil and take it for a spin just the other week.

This already exists.

Look up Nio. They already have fully automatic battery swapping stations for cars leasing the pack. You literally swap the whole pack instead of charging when it’s empty.

Takes less than 10 minutes

nice concept and i think framework might actually do a protoype of this kind of car when they get the investors and the funds currently they still are a small company so i really hope that they become larger in this decade

Planned obsolescence should be illegal and strongly punished

My uncle bought a used car built in communist east Germany. He always emphasized how it was built like a tank to last. Capitalism is great and all, but it promotes waste. Companies have an incentive to make products that fail and need to be repurchased. Planned obsolescence is fine if it was only about people craving something better. As it stands, it’s more of a forced switch with breakable parts.

Probably not a bad thing if your primary concern is the environment.

Exactly. I’m looking for a repairable EV, and so many kinda suck. A lot have big computer modules that control nearly everything, the battery pack uses bespoke parts that aren’t available from the manufacturer, etc. They probably need less maintenance, but they will need that maintenance eventually.

It’s disappointing the direction everything is going.

the one pain point would be the batteries, and those have no reason to not be easily maintainable and highly universal. They’re all modular and often times even using the same cell types.

While it’s true that EVs can be built with fewer moving parts in the drive system itself, and that companies could absolutely produce longer lasting vehicles if they focused on longevity, there are still a lot of parts of a vehicle that simply will not last beyond a certain point. The moving parts of an EV still cover everything in the suspension, wheels/brakes/steering, and a number of other components that are very costly to replace, not to mention the underlying frame/unibody of the vehicle itself being vulnerable to wear over time depending on the conditions it’s driven in. “The few moving parts that wear out” still covers a huge swath of a vehicle, even if you take the engine and transmission out of the equation.

Well-built EVs with a focus on longevity and repairability could extend the lifespan of the average people mover by a great deal, but at the end of the day cars will by nature eventually reach a point where the cost to repair some major core component becomes too great to justify, outside of rare or collectable cases.

A lot of this also comes back to asshole design, and EV’s can be particularly bad for this. Switching to large touch “entertainment” displays is a major issue. With my last ICE (Honda) vehicle, it was integrated into the backup+side cameras and a few comfort/convenience features. I could still replace that with a new head unit, though only certain ones would still support the cameras.

My wife’s EV (Hyundai) on the other hand, the console isn’t really made in a way where it seems swappable, and even if it was there are major system functions - such as configuring charge/power settings - which can only be configured from that (or the dogshyte app that screws up often and requires a paid subscription after 3yr)

Exactly this…in new cars its not the transmission or engine failure that causes it to be junked but rather all the rubber/ plastic bits going to shit and costing an arm and a leg to replace…

Yeah. Markass Brownie got his Tesla in an accident. Repairs? More than 50% of sticker price. Sure you can throw the chassis out and put on a new one, but what about a hundred little sensors that also need troubleshooting, repair and calibration? Gotta go through them one by one.

There needs to be a market for aftermarket batteries

Won’t anybody think of the poor shareholders? Planned obsolescence is what keeps this whole system running.

States have had no trouble passing and enforcing IP law that allows companies to get away with this. Reverse engineering would be the norm for closed source anything to the point it would be made irrelevant if companies didn’t have the overwhelming weight of the legal system on their side to shut down anyone who dares try open up access to their designs.

Right to repair is great, but we are fighting against the entire weight of the entrenched ruling class to get it passed. It’s going to take a lot of activism, and even then it’s almost certainly going to be watered down and cater to large corporations when it does pass. We need to keep the pressure on them.

If this was law, and companies had to divulge how there stuff worked and was assembled, as well as sell parts, things would last longer.

I’m all for it but I think you’re being a bit too optimistic. If we had the right to repair then the prices of repair kits and materials is going to go up most likely. I can think of a few other ways they can make that system obnoxious too.

It’s like everything else. Yeah, the general systems in place could be greatly improved but ultimately the majority of the issues lie with the people at the top who refuse to let us have good things. No matter what laws are passed they will find a way to profit at any cost. The shareholders behind massive corporations are the first priority because no solution we create will work as efficiently as it can unless they are out of the picture.

Especially if it’s made by Delco. Ask me how I know.

I would think an electric vehicle would have quite a lot fewer things like gaskets and other seals since gas isn’t involved. Other than the normal wear and tear items like brakes, shocks, rotors, etc, battery repair would be the major thing I’d expect to need work. I imagine many mechanics aren’t trained to handle these, so they end up just replacing the whole unit. Obviously this is wasteful though but could be easily solved via training.

Modularity of construction, so that rubber components can be replaced without scrapping the whole vehicle. Reducing reliance on plastic parts, or improving the ease and quality of plastic recycling, so that we can fix the exterior components without sacrificing the chassis and core parts.

My guess is the thermodynamics of a hot engine makes the rubber and plastic parts fail more quickly than they would otherwise.

20-30 years for rubber…

You have way too much confidence. Have you owned a car for 10+ years? Almost everything rubber - especially within the suspension system needs replacement within the first 10 years of wear and tear.

I think we will see that car manufacturers will start to

They started to do this decades ago. Generally any given part in a car might be left unchanged for 5 or 6 model years before it gets changed, often for completely arbitrary reasons. For many cars, if it’s over ten years old your only hope for a replacement part is the junkyard.

Planned Obsolescence, baby!

That said, we might be able to make industrial scale recycling an economically efficient activity if we build more durable goods with a longer lifecycle and limit the availability of new territory to strip mine and abandon.

So much of our “cheap” access to minerals and fossil fuels boils down to valuing unimproved real estate as at zero dollars and ignoring the enormous waste produced during the extraction process. Properly accounting for the destruction of undeveloped real estate and the emissions/waste created during industrial processing could dramatically improve how much waste we produce and - consequently - how long our durable goods last.

And few people want to work for free or want put aside too much of there personal wealth to help people for things that don’t seem critical (like healthcare for example which has a lot of nonprofit activities).

I hope OpenSource keeps takening off in the field. Communalize the engineering results so we advance together, and lower the cost of manufacturing with diy/small scale manufacturing and maybe we can get better things at costs more can afford without enslaving people.

I replaced the main battery in a Gen1 Prius. Fiddly. Had to get a strong buddy to help lift it in and out of the car, but we did it in a long weekend. A full set of ‘used but tested’ cells cost something like $750 but that was probably 8 years ago.

I was going to scoff at the Prius…the battery is only 1500$.

I need a Prius frame in an El Camino body.

There’s an old expression: Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.

If a car has a warranty of 10 years, it will last 11 years.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://www.piped.video/watch?v=hNZy603as5w

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.

Swappable batteries are a giant headache, charging is better.

Batteries are lasting longer and longer, LFP are already able to last 20 times as long as typical lithium ion, while using less cobalt.

Modern EV tech is still relatively new. It took combustion cars a long time to get to present day longevity and efficiency. EVs will catch up.

I think we will stick with built-in batteries rather than any kind of swapping. I always thought the battery swapping idea was neat, but the real world cares about money more than anything.

To have ubiquitous battery swapping stations would be a huge amount of infrastructure. But to have ubiquitous vehicle charging you basically just have to run wires to existing parking spots.

That is combined with the fact that I think batteries, especially LFP batteries, have a lot more cycles in their lifetime than your 10 year estimate would suggest. I’ve read 4000 cycles for LFP in a few places. That’s more than a decade even if you fully charge and discharge the battery every single day. Drive a more realistic number of miles/kms per day and then the chronological age of the battery might be more important than how many cycles are on it.

At best case 60 miles an hour… Your commute was more than 90 mins? Ugh. That’s awful.

You weren’t clear if that was round trip or not, so possibly more than 180 mins? How did you find time to sleep!?

.

Sure, there’s always going to be outliers. Most people live and work in the same metropolitan area though - they’re not driving 50,000km+ a year. Besides, having a vehicle with 5 times the effective lifetime is going to be a big win regardless of how much you drive it.

LED bulbs last pretty much forever.

Well yes, but the light would be very dim, if we are talking about incandescent bulbs.

Technology connections had an episode about it.

That is too general of a statement. I have three EVs in my family, none of them do any temp condition of the battery just by being plugged in. However, EVCC turns off the wallbox when they reach 75% SoC and there is no appointment that day in our shared calendar. Sitting at high SoCs kills batteries, especially in warm climates.

Have you ever been driven the Desert Bus from Tucson to Las Vegas on that Genesis game?

There’s not much room for improvement in terms of efficiency for EVs, except maybe lower rolling resistance tyres and better aero. You generally have to replace the whole car for better aero though unless you don’t mind having some bolt on mods 😂

As soon as a car company figures out autonomous taxis you will see them go super modular for repairability

It will be too profitable