I don’t get this. I live in the sweet spot for ev ownership: in an area with rich liberals who like outwardly show they care about the environment.
4 people on my block have Teslas. All of them say they love the car. The guy who lives across the street from me says his only regret is that he didn’t get the AWD version because his sucks in the snow. My boss owns a Tesla, said he would absolutely buy one again. My cousin leased one and said that when he goes to buy a car, it would likely be a Tesla. One of my best friends bought one, and loves it. I rented one (it was 15 dollars more a day, with free charging, so I’m pretty sure it more than made up the cost) and it was mostly a pleasure to drive (not a big fan of the touch screen for everything).
According to Consumer Reports, Tesla is one of the top brands for owner satisfaction.
Yet here on lemmy, you would think that owning a Tesla is some kind of miserable experience. I can’t help but believe it’s driven by a dislike of musk, rather than Teslas actually being bad cars.
I think our bias is that a huge portion of us are scientists and engineers, so the things that bother us aren’t the same things that bother everyone else. Most people don’t worry about how their car works, or want to repair it themselves, etc.
Im not buying this. If it could be demonstrated, I’d be willing to bet that at least 99% of the people who upvoted this have never even changed a spark plug, let alone anything actually complicated or difficult with their car.
It’s clearly en vogue on lemmy to hate on Tesla, which is almost certainly why this has so many upvotes. I just don’t get why people have to pretend the cars are shit when seemingly it’s really about hating musk.
I’m part of that 1% and I’ll echo the “Tesla hate” for that very reason. I do the vast majority of maintenance and repair on my vehicles – something I picked up as a broke young man that couldn’t afford to do otherwise.
I’m not buying something that’s designed to actively prevent me from working on it myself. And the other “99%” of people are absolutely right in being upset since independent repair shops are no longer an option. With no competition they’re at the whim of Tesla when it comes to the cost and time-frame of repair work.
Since when are independent shops no longer an option? I just checked their site and it says you can take it to independent shops, but risk warranty.
I can’t speak to the work that would be done on it, but in a proof is in the pudding type of guy (being an engineer myself, who also used to do most of the work on my car) and the evidence seems to suggest people are happy with their Teslas, not so much with their printers.
Apparently I’m going off of old information. I just found out there are independent shops that are certified by Tesla to do work now, although it looks (and correct me if I’m wrong) like they’re limited to “routine” maintenance and repairs. It also looks like many of the tools required for repair are locked behind said certification.
Exactly. Until the battery can be worked on (i.e. the most expensive part) with full documentation and support from Tesla, then I’m not going to consider it. I can replace the engine and any part of the drive train that I want on pretty much any ICE car.
I understand that there are safety issues here, but without documentation, users are left with reverse engineering, which is even more dangerous. Tesla’s stance so far is, “if there’s damage, replace it,” which is just another way of saying “planned obsolescence” since replacement of a battery pack is ~3/4 of the price of the car.
Then there’s the BS all car manufacturers are seeming to do these days in tracking users and keeping things locked away from user control (e.g. disabling data collection). It’s getting increasingly difficult to find a reasonably privacy-respecting vehicle, and EVs are the worst offenders here.
If an EV comes along with:
independent shop-serviceable battery packs
no data collection (or at least user-verifiable, opt-out data collection)
everything aside from battery packs are user serviceable with full documentation
I’ll probably get it. I’m especially interested in sodium-ion EVs since they should be far less expensive and probably safer. I don’t need anything fancy, I just need to get to work, and I’d really prefer to do that without being tracked by the car manufacturer.
Which is perfectly valid, imo. It’s a very similar reason as to why people boycott Nestle products. It’s not necessarily because Nestle products themselves are unsatisfactory, it’s because people take issue with Nestle’s leadership and the executive decisions they make.
Yup. Cars don’t have carburators anymore (fuel injection ftw), but if you can work on your lawnmower’s carburetor, you can fix most things on a car. All you need are:
OBD2 scanner - crappy ones can be had for $20, but so yourself a favor and get a good one (so you don’t burn out your car’s computer)
basic tools - wrenches and screwdrivers - usually only need one or two sizes, not a full set
YouTube
patience
If you have those, you can do most ICE and EV maintenance. Parts and documentation are generally available.
EVs are a different beast. If you’re doing anything beyond the very basics (e.g. tires, headlights, etc), you’ll have no documentation and may void your warranty.
Well so does Apple. Well, BSD, really, of which Mac OS is a heavily modified version. But who gives a shit as it’s lacking the most important part of BSD - the license. We’d rather praise Microsoft for open-sourcing stuff instead.
You can’t bring up BSD and not finish the pedantic history of macOS. Leave it at “macOS is a UNIX” or get into the weeds.
macOS userland (i.e. terminal commands) is mostly FreeBSD with some stuff from other BSDs. However, the kernel is a separate project entirely and comes from NEXT (Steve Jobs’ project when he briefly left Apple), which was based on the Mach microkernel. Both FreeBSD and Linux use monolithic kernels, and there’s pretty much no shared heritage there with macOS. Also, macOS uses its own init (launchd), filesystems (HFS+), etc, and doesn’t support the standard stuff in BSD (e.g. FreeBSD init, UFS, ZFS) or the standard stuff in Linux (e.g. sysvinit, systemd, ext4, etc).
The overlap between macOS and Linux is essentially zero other than some shared UNIX idioms and a few packages like bash. The overlap between macOS and FreeBSD is the userland, which most people don’t interact with unless they’re terminal nerds like me. The overlap is just the macOS borrowed a lot of open source stuff, it’s not really based on FreeBSD at all.
I think half of it is Elon Musk and the other half are the news stories about the numerous problems they seem to have.
There are some things that Tesla does wrong, but a lot of these issues are also found in other EVs. It’s a car for somebody who is fine using Apple products.
Love my Tesla, wouldn’t go back to an ice car.
I’m not particularly a fan of Musk, but I’m definitely a fan of the science and engineering being done across his companies.
Comparing a ownership of a printer to owning a Tesla? Kind of a lame joke
For the most part, the cars are fine. I really enjoy working on a car and find pleasure in purely mechanical things. I like internal combustion engines.
Sure, I think Musk is an idiot. But it’s much more that I think Teslas are overrated. My biggest gripe is the arbitrary changing of existing user controls and their ethos of the car should anticipate and do things for me. I don’t want the car to do anything unless I tell it to. Even if it is something as simple as turn signals.
I don’t want solenoids for car handles.
I don’t want controls on a fucking touchscreen.
I don’t want automatic updates.
I don’t want subscriptions.
I don’t want to be able to change the horn (because a horn is supposed to be a safety item and sound a certain way.)
I don’t want stupid games on the touchscreen.
On top of all that, I think they are pretty ugly too.
So, really nothing to do with them being bad cars, just things you preferentially don’t like.
As I said elsewhere, I don’t give a shit if anyone likes Tesla. I will consider one when I buy a new car, but I highly doubt I’ll end up buying one. My issue is with this pervasive belief here that Teslas are miserable, problem-ridden, locked-down piles of junk, like many modern day printers. It just doesn’t seem to line up with reality.
one pretty legitimate criticism i have heard about them is that they are essentially worthless after 10 years because the batteries are knackered and tesla charges A LOT (as in more than the cost of an equivalent car) for replacement batteries.
Hopefully the 3rd party battery market kicks its self into gear at some point. And hopefully Tesla doesn’t go the apple route of part pairing.
I’d like to be able to buy a second hand EV when i’m living somewhere where i can charge it (currently in an apartment block with no parking). I’d like to be able to do that without having to risk paying brand prices for a new battery.
My petrol BMW 3 series on the other hand is 19 years old and still going strong. It’s literally old enough to buy booze
Musk claims that they should last between 500k and 800k km, and there is evidence to back up that they do last some time (although, with not much time under the belt, it’s hard to say) which is more than the typical 300k (if you’re lucky) on an ICE car. And the current price of replacing the battery looks like it’s in the 13-20k range. So not way more than the car itself, although maybe you are talking used.
Yes, an equivalent to a 10 year old car would be a used one.
And you’ll forgive me for taking Musks “claims” with a pinch of salt
I also own a 12 year old Lexus rx450h with 150k miles on the clock and the battery is imo starting to show it’s age, and that’s not even a plug in hybrid. I am expecting to have to replace the battery within the next 2 years
I think the bar is pretty high for EVs. I have a non-Telsa EV, and the driving experience is just so nice. Even if the rest of the car had a bunch of issues I would imagine the way that Teslas drive would be enough to still make people love them. They would probably love a better built EV more.
Yeah but people hate the printers because they are a pita and not enjoyable to use. Which is why I switched to brother printers (well, just one, I’ve had it for well over a decade at this point).
People still seem pretty happy with a Tesla and would buy again, despite there being other options.
I can recognize that the driving experience of a Tesla is very nice, from the one or two times I’ve test driven one. It’s the other things aside from that experience that I take issue with though. Things like their subscription model to unlock certain features (which other car brands also employ, and turn me away from those brands as well), and, yes, the leadership decisions and actions made by Elon Musk. Both are valid reasons to not buy a particular product in my opinion.
Any reason is a valid reason to not buy a car; I’m not saying anyone should buy a Tesla. I’m challenging the claim that owning a Tesla is a miserable experience akin to owning some of these printers.
Owner satisfaction surveys definitely cast a ton of doubt on the general opinion here that owning a Tesla sucks.
I think you might be splitting hairs a little bit though, and maybe not properly taking the audience on Lemmy into account. For a largely left-leaning tech-knowledgeable audience, it is miserable owning a car that requires a subscription and collects your data, no matter how well it drives. That probably doesn’t reflect on consumer reports because the audience on Lemmy is small, but the concentration of people that have similar opinions here is relatively high.
I did a quick search and it looks like you are neither required to have a subscription nor share data with them. Can you point me to what proves this is untrue?
I guess privacy concerns and subscriptions are not the first thing that jump to my mind when I think about printer sucking…you do? I also question this because none of the top comments above mine reference either of these.
I did a quick search and it looks like you are neither required to have a subscription nor share data with them.
My bad, I wasn’t clear. You are required to pay a subscription to enable certain features of a Tesla, like autopilot/FSD. Those are simply software updates though, they’re not adding new hardware. I don’t like that. If I buy a car, I want all of the features of the car to come with that initial price. Buying a car and then learning I have to spend more money for a particular feature already built into the car is not a satisfactory experience.
privacy concerns and subscriptions are not the first thing that jump to my mind when I think about printer sucking…you do?
Absolutely. Some of the main gripes I and others on Lemmy have with modern printers are things like:
vendor lock in with microchipped ink cartridges - if a 3rd party has made better/cheaper ink compliant with my printer, who is HP/Brother/etc to say I can’t use it?
ink subscription programs - a lot of new printers nowadays aggressively advertise ink subscription programs. But I have enough subscriptions to track, and I don’t go through ink fast enough to warrant having it sent to me monthly or whatever. However, buying ink outside of their subscription costs nearly as much as the original printer itself.
Internet-connected printers that collect info - I don’t need HP/Brother/etc remotely running diagnostics, checking my ink levels, making sure I’m using the “right” ink, or locking me out of my device if I’m not using it “correctly”. It’s my device, I paid for it, I’ll use it how I see fit.
Buying a car and then learning I have to spend more money for a particular feature already built into the car is not a satisfactory experience.
Sure, but this seems like an unfair criticism for something that is currently under development still. It’s not like they are asking you to pay a subscription for heated seats, which are there and don’t need any updates or maintenance. But self driving is something currently under active development and will always need updates. So a subscription there makes sense, unless you are expecting to get no updates on it.
main gripes I and others
Speak for yourself for, as I pointed out, all of the gripes here don’t reference privacy or subscriptions at all. And I like how having the option of getting a subscription is a drawback for you.
I really really wanted one. Now that I can afford one, I won’t get one because Musk is a giant dbag. I’ll wait and find something cool to do an EV conversion on.
Well yeah, on Lemmy, you’ll get the anti-Musk sentiment. I honestly rarely base purchasing decisions on who the CEO happens to be, and I’ll only avoid a company if I think purchasing from them actively harms either their employees, the environment, or the market as a whole (e.g. they’re a monopoly).
Here’s why I don’t want a Tesla:
Too expensive for a commuter, not enough range for a family car (we do road trips)
Battery is pretty much unrepairable, and too expensive to just replace
Fire risk - I know it’s relatively low, but my ICE cars don’t have a risk of burning my house down
Can’t turn off tracking, AFAIK - I don’t need my car to do anything but get me from A to B, and none of that requires network access
Quality control issues - I don’t want to keep going to the dealer to get recalls serviced
Crappy in the snow - I live in the Rockies
The first four are deal breakers, though to be fair the rest of the car industry is trying hard to fail point 4.
I’m looking forward to sodium-ion EVs, which promise to solve 1&3, and make replacement a lot cheaper. If I can find something that solves the first four, I’ll probably buy it. I’d love to never have to fill up gas again, but I’m not giving up my privacy or ability to repair my own equipment.
I don’t get this. I live in the sweet spot for ev ownership: in an area with rich liberals who like outwardly show they care about the environment.
4 people on my block have Teslas. All of them say they love the car. The guy who lives across the street from me says his only regret is that he didn’t get the AWD version because his sucks in the snow. My boss owns a Tesla, said he would absolutely buy one again. My cousin leased one and said that when he goes to buy a car, it would likely be a Tesla. One of my best friends bought one, and loves it. I rented one (it was 15 dollars more a day, with free charging, so I’m pretty sure it more than made up the cost) and it was mostly a pleasure to drive (not a big fan of the touch screen for everything).
According to Consumer Reports, Tesla is one of the top brands for owner satisfaction.
Yet here on lemmy, you would think that owning a Tesla is some kind of miserable experience. I can’t help but believe it’s driven by a dislike of musk, rather than Teslas actually being bad cars.
I think our bias is that a huge portion of us are scientists and engineers, so the things that bother us aren’t the same things that bother everyone else. Most people don’t worry about how their car works, or want to repair it themselves, etc.
It’s not the car for a Linux user.
Im not buying this. If it could be demonstrated, I’d be willing to bet that at least 99% of the people who upvoted this have never even changed a spark plug, let alone anything actually complicated or difficult with their car.
It’s clearly en vogue on lemmy to hate on Tesla, which is almost certainly why this has so many upvotes. I just don’t get why people have to pretend the cars are shit when seemingly it’s really about hating musk.
I’m part of that 1% and I’ll echo the “Tesla hate” for that very reason. I do the vast majority of maintenance and repair on my vehicles – something I picked up as a broke young man that couldn’t afford to do otherwise.
I’m not buying something that’s designed to actively prevent me from working on it myself. And the other “99%” of people are absolutely right in being upset since independent repair shops are no longer an option. With no competition they’re at the whim of Tesla when it comes to the cost and time-frame of repair work.
Since when are independent shops no longer an option? I just checked their site and it says you can take it to independent shops, but risk warranty.
I can’t speak to the work that would be done on it, but in a proof is in the pudding type of guy (being an engineer myself, who also used to do most of the work on my car) and the evidence seems to suggest people are happy with their Teslas, not so much with their printers.
Apparently I’m going off of old information. I just found out there are independent shops that are certified by Tesla to do work now, although it looks (and correct me if I’m wrong) like they’re limited to “routine” maintenance and repairs. It also looks like many of the tools required for repair are locked behind said certification.
So the situation is better than it was 3+ years ago, but my new stance is there are still serious right-to-repair issues with Tesla that precludes me from buying one.
Exactly. Until the battery can be worked on (i.e. the most expensive part) with full documentation and support from Tesla, then I’m not going to consider it. I can replace the engine and any part of the drive train that I want on pretty much any ICE car.
I understand that there are safety issues here, but without documentation, users are left with reverse engineering, which is even more dangerous. Tesla’s stance so far is, “if there’s damage, replace it,” which is just another way of saying “planned obsolescence” since replacement of a battery pack is ~3/4 of the price of the car.
Then there’s the BS all car manufacturers are seeming to do these days in tracking users and keeping things locked away from user control (e.g. disabling data collection). It’s getting increasingly difficult to find a reasonably privacy-respecting vehicle, and EVs are the worst offenders here.
If an EV comes along with:
I’ll probably get it. I’m especially interested in sodium-ion EVs since they should be far less expensive and probably safer. I don’t need anything fancy, I just need to get to work, and I’d really prefer to do that without being tracked by the car manufacturer.
Thanks for the info.
Elon Musk is a trash person, that’s why I don’t like Tesla
Which is perfectly valid, imo. It’s a very similar reason as to why people boycott Nestle products. It’s not necessarily because Nestle products themselves are unsatisfactory, it’s because people take issue with Nestle’s leadership and the executive decisions they make.
To be fair, Elon Musk hasn’t done a horrible with Tesla itself, but the actions he takes outside Tesla are abhorrent.
Nestle itself does abhorrent things, so there’s zero way of separating the products from the company.
I’ve changed a spark plug, and assume I’m typical here.
Dear readers: Please downvote this comment if you have never changed a spark plug.
I took the carb apart on my lawnmower once, does that count?
Yup. Cars don’t have carburators anymore (fuel injection ftw), but if you can work on your lawnmower’s carburetor, you can fix most things on a car. All you need are:
If you have those, you can do most ICE and EV maintenance. Parts and documentation are generally available.
EVs are a different beast. If you’re doing anything beyond the very basics (e.g. tires, headlights, etc), you’ll have no documentation and may void your warranty.
Funny because (at least last I checked) The cars use linux.
Can you pick a distribution or is it more like Android?
I think it is more likely to be Embedded Android
Well so does Apple. Well, BSD, really, of which Mac OS is a heavily modified version. But who gives a shit as it’s lacking the most important part of BSD - the license. We’d rather praise Microsoft for open-sourcing stuff instead.
You can’t bring up BSD and not finish the pedantic history of macOS. Leave it at “macOS is a UNIX” or get into the weeds.
macOS userland (i.e. terminal commands) is mostly FreeBSD with some stuff from other BSDs. However, the kernel is a separate project entirely and comes from NEXT (Steve Jobs’ project when he briefly left Apple), which was based on the Mach microkernel. Both FreeBSD and Linux use monolithic kernels, and there’s pretty much no shared heritage there with macOS. Also, macOS uses its own init (launchd), filesystems (HFS+), etc, and doesn’t support the standard stuff in BSD (e.g. FreeBSD init, UFS, ZFS) or the standard stuff in Linux (e.g. sysvinit, systemd, ext4, etc).
The overlap between macOS and Linux is essentially zero other than some shared UNIX idioms and a few packages like bash. The overlap between macOS and FreeBSD is the userland, which most people don’t interact with unless they’re terminal nerds like me. The overlap is just the macOS borrowed a lot of open source stuff, it’s not really based on FreeBSD at all.
I love my Tesla and hate musk with the fire of a billion suns.
I’m sorry haters, but Teslas are absolutely fantastic cars to own and drive, in my 2 years of owning one. ZERO ISSUES and 100,000km down.
That said the only reason I’ll not buy one NEXT is because that nazi fuck head is attached to the brand and has poisoned the joy of owning it.
I’ve been thinking of buying a EV for a while now. Tesla was obviously the top of the list. Now it’s kind of the bottom of the list.
Same
I think half of it is Elon Musk and the other half are the news stories about the numerous problems they seem to have.
There are some things that Tesla does wrong, but a lot of these issues are also found in other EVs. It’s a car for somebody who is fine using Apple products.
No half about it for me. 100% the fact musk is a giant piece of shit.
Love my Tesla, wouldn’t go back to an ice car. I’m not particularly a fan of Musk, but I’m definitely a fan of the science and engineering being done across his companies. Comparing a ownership of a printer to owning a Tesla? Kind of a lame joke
For the most part, the cars are fine. I really enjoy working on a car and find pleasure in purely mechanical things. I like internal combustion engines.
Sure, I think Musk is an idiot. But it’s much more that I think Teslas are overrated. My biggest gripe is the arbitrary changing of existing user controls and their ethos of the car should anticipate and do things for me. I don’t want the car to do anything unless I tell it to. Even if it is something as simple as turn signals.
On top of all that, I think they are pretty ugly too.
So, really nothing to do with them being bad cars, just things you preferentially don’t like.
As I said elsewhere, I don’t give a shit if anyone likes Tesla. I will consider one when I buy a new car, but I highly doubt I’ll end up buying one. My issue is with this pervasive belief here that Teslas are miserable, problem-ridden, locked-down piles of junk, like many modern day printers. It just doesn’t seem to line up with reality.
one pretty legitimate criticism i have heard about them is that they are essentially worthless after 10 years because the batteries are knackered and tesla charges A LOT (as in more than the cost of an equivalent car) for replacement batteries.
Hopefully the 3rd party battery market kicks its self into gear at some point. And hopefully Tesla doesn’t go the apple route of part pairing.
I’d like to be able to buy a second hand EV when i’m living somewhere where i can charge it (currently in an apartment block with no parking). I’d like to be able to do that without having to risk paying brand prices for a new battery.
My petrol BMW 3 series on the other hand is 19 years old and still going strong. It’s literally old enough to buy booze
Musk claims that they should last between 500k and 800k km, and there is evidence to back up that they do last some time (although, with not much time under the belt, it’s hard to say) which is more than the typical 300k (if you’re lucky) on an ICE car. And the current price of replacing the battery looks like it’s in the 13-20k range. So not way more than the car itself, although maybe you are talking used.
Yes, an equivalent to a 10 year old car would be a used one.
And you’ll forgive me for taking Musks “claims” with a pinch of salt
I also own a 12 year old Lexus rx450h with 150k miles on the clock and the battery is imo starting to show it’s age, and that’s not even a plug in hybrid. I am expecting to have to replace the battery within the next 2 years
I think the bar is pretty high for EVs. I have a non-Telsa EV, and the driving experience is just so nice. Even if the rest of the car had a bunch of issues I would imagine the way that Teslas drive would be enough to still make people love them. They would probably love a better built EV more.
Yeah but people hate the printers because they are a pita and not enjoyable to use. Which is why I switched to brother printers (well, just one, I’ve had it for well over a decade at this point).
People still seem pretty happy with a Tesla and would buy again, despite there being other options.
I can recognize that the driving experience of a Tesla is very nice, from the one or two times I’ve test driven one. It’s the other things aside from that experience that I take issue with though. Things like their subscription model to unlock certain features (which other car brands also employ, and turn me away from those brands as well), and, yes, the leadership decisions and actions made by Elon Musk. Both are valid reasons to not buy a particular product in my opinion.
Any reason is a valid reason to not buy a car; I’m not saying anyone should buy a Tesla. I’m challenging the claim that owning a Tesla is a miserable experience akin to owning some of these printers.
Owner satisfaction surveys definitely cast a ton of doubt on the general opinion here that owning a Tesla sucks.
I think you might be splitting hairs a little bit though, and maybe not properly taking the audience on Lemmy into account. For a largely left-leaning tech-knowledgeable audience, it is miserable owning a car that requires a subscription and collects your data, no matter how well it drives. That probably doesn’t reflect on consumer reports because the audience on Lemmy is small, but the concentration of people that have similar opinions here is relatively high.
I did a quick search and it looks like you are neither required to have a subscription nor share data with them. Can you point me to what proves this is untrue?
I guess privacy concerns and subscriptions are not the first thing that jump to my mind when I think about printer sucking…you do? I also question this because none of the top comments above mine reference either of these.
My bad, I wasn’t clear. You are required to pay a subscription to enable certain features of a Tesla, like autopilot/FSD. Those are simply software updates though, they’re not adding new hardware. I don’t like that. If I buy a car, I want all of the features of the car to come with that initial price. Buying a car and then learning I have to spend more money for a particular feature already built into the car is not a satisfactory experience.
Absolutely. Some of the main gripes I and others on Lemmy have with modern printers are things like:
Sure, but this seems like an unfair criticism for something that is currently under development still. It’s not like they are asking you to pay a subscription for heated seats, which are there and don’t need any updates or maintenance. But self driving is something currently under active development and will always need updates. So a subscription there makes sense, unless you are expecting to get no updates on it.
Speak for yourself for, as I pointed out, all of the gripes here don’t reference privacy or subscriptions at all. And I like how having the option of getting a subscription is a drawback for you.
I really really wanted one. Now that I can afford one, I won’t get one because Musk is a giant dbag. I’ll wait and find something cool to do an EV conversion on.
Well yeah, on Lemmy, you’ll get the anti-Musk sentiment. I honestly rarely base purchasing decisions on who the CEO happens to be, and I’ll only avoid a company if I think purchasing from them actively harms either their employees, the environment, or the market as a whole (e.g. they’re a monopoly).
Here’s why I don’t want a Tesla:
The first four are deal breakers, though to be fair the rest of the car industry is trying hard to fail point 4.
I’m looking forward to sodium-ion EVs, which promise to solve 1&3, and make replacement a lot cheaper. If I can find something that solves the first four, I’ll probably buy it. I’d love to never have to fill up gas again, but I’m not giving up my privacy or ability to repair my own equipment.