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.

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

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Goddamn planned obsolescence.

What was the issue? Do you know?

“landed”?

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!)

Lemmy: Capitalism caused this.

In a socialist system cars would be tree proof.

Sad to see an i5 in that condition :(

damn wild trees crossing street

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

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.

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

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

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.

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, 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 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.

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.

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.

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

My current phone is from 2017.

They don’t?

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.