Its really worth reading the whole Article. Im looking forward to long lasting EVs, but I really fear that, what the author also described in his article, may come true. I think we will see that car manufacturers will start to act like hardware company’s and start to force you to regularly buy a new car by making your car incompatible to new features or by designing it to fail after a few years.
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.
Or your local friendly 3D Printer mad scientist. Provided they have a metal and a plastic printer.
The opensource edm machine that is just now gain popularity seems like a great choice for parts! LumenPNP for machine replacement circuit boards on larger scales is exciting to me too ( I hate hand soldering so maybe its just a personal thing lol).
My local maker space built a plasma tourch and table too. Honestly it feels likes all coming together for it to be done
Yeah, options open up for some massively popular models or otherwise very well loved models. I got replacement gears for headlight motors for a 90s car with pop-up headlights, because people got tired of the OEM design wearing out so easily. I suspect someone trying to keep a Pontiac Aztek going might have a harder time finding enthusiasts keeping things alive.
Or, God forbid, a Chrysler PT Cruiser. I liked the look, shame their drivetrain is universally shit.
This is basically like saying combustion vehicles could last nearly forever if you replaced the engine every now and then
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.
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
It’s easy to do, and engines don’t cost much on ebay.
Fortunately Honda makes vehicles that are very durable, so it’s not like everything dies at the same age of the engine.
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.
New pilot? I dunno what any of this means
forever cars no make profit line go up
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.
Who wants an infinite lifespan car anyway? Everything else would be getting safer and more fuel efficient. Might as well get around on horse and buggy.
For one most engines are pretty much at their peak efficiency, for two practical safety features reached peak between the mid 90s to the early 00s. Most modern safety features are ironically enough not all that safe, for example lane assist makes people pay less attention or it tries to assist in the lane and overcorrects. I see the latter rather frequently in my area since windy roads, usually the damned things are trying to avoid the white lines of the shoulder and overcorrect over the yellow.
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.
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.
Will use 4x as much electricity though, ugh.
https://www.cleanenergyresourceteams.org/your-old-refrigerator-energy-hog
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).
https://reviewed.usatoday.com/dishwashers/features/ask-the-experts-why-dont-new-home-appliances-last
We have a refrigerator from the '80s that runs like a champ.
Solved the energy problem by putting solar panels on the roof.
Sub Zero, Thermador… High end refrigerators, just look at the price, we decided to forget the idea because of that.
well yeah, we generally make less money now, and manufacturers make more, relatively speaking.
I haven’t looked at the statistical data on this myself, but there’s something to be said for survivorship bias.
Not to mention those old fridges are Horribly inefficient on energy
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
180W100W 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.
Here a link to bypass the paywall:
What about it’s batteries?
They are still chemical so they wouldn’t last forever.
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.
That’s patently false, according to https://www.findmyelectric.com/blog/tesla-battery-replacement-cost-explained/#:~:text=Absolutely.,will likely also be similar.
My 2013 Model S has 235,000 miles on it and still l drives like it’s brand new. I haven’t yet had to replace the battery pack but when that day comes, it will almost certainly be worth the cost.
Here is the link where Sandy Munroe determined the Model Y pack is non repairable and it includes Elon Musk’s reply tweet saying the pack should be seen as “high grade ore”.
Says it’s true
That…can’t be true.
Another reason on my list why to never buy a Tesla.
I bet smartphones could last 3 or 4 years even if companies let them 😏
Wait, are you saying my phone should last less time than it does?
My current phone is from 2017.
iPhones tend to last 5 or so years for me…
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.
Imagine being able to opt into an long term support branch when you feel your phone starting to lag
That’s kind of what LineageOS does.
I wish more bootloader’s came unlocked these days. I got a Google pixel for that, the seven years of promised updates, and parts.
Though I think it would be cheaper to buy a used pixel 8 from eBay and the adhesive from ifixit if I end up braking the screen in a few years I’m more interested in being able to get a fresh battery without guessing if it was salvaged from a heavily used phone.
Edit: phones should be more like the laptops from the early 2000s damnit. I don’t care if my phone is a little thicker than a pencil at least it’ll hide the camera bump.
I am very anxious even with normal maintenance - heating adhesive up is not something I am capable of now. So was looking at new last-gen Pixels instead, and 7a is $300 :( People I know who have it say it’s good hardware, but that’s still an insane sum to spend on a phone.
Tbh it’s not a bad price looking at what other phones are out at that price. Your looking at a great screen, awesome camera, ok battery life, and snappy enough performance for everyday stuff.
At the end of the day it’s what you can afford and what you need. If you have a small repair shop nearby it wouldn’t hurt to give it a try, see how expensive the repair might bee. If your current phone is fine then keep using it, if you need a phone on a budget I’d go used, anything new under $200 will most likely be worse than anything you can get used, and if you want something new that pixel 7a wouldn’t be half bad tbh.
What are you even doing, throwing your phone on the ground? How does your phone not last that long
I don’t get how people are replacing their phones so damn often. I buy used flagships that are usually a year or two old and rock them for another 4 years. Note 10+ here, and I’ve had it for around 3 years now, probably won’t upgrade for another 2 years, as it’s perfectly fine still.
I had a Sony Xperia something for years, no case. Then I upgraded to a Samsung and gave my Sony to my mum. She cracked the back of it almost immediately lol
Like the new LED lightbulbs. Buy one now and they last a year or so. I bought one of them WAY back when they were brand new and horribly expensive and the damn thing still works just fine.
Companies can’t stand new technologies that just work. They have to build in planned obsolescence. See also: smartphones, especially iTrash that make you buy a new one every year or two because updates slow them down.
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.
deleted by creator
I bought about 20 Cree bulbs 5 years ago, 15 are on about 15 hours a day. I’ve had 2 fail in that time.
Not a bad record in my book.
Even the off brands, IKEA, Amazon, etc, seem to last as long. They’re all in open fixtures, so no cooling issues.
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.
this whole ass marketing script for apple as a response to a throwaway line about planned obsolescence strikes joy in me. it’s 100% like something i would do. thank you, i love you, you are fun and valued
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.
The LEDs will also fail from overheating. LED bulbs don’t last long in fully enclosed fixtures that were designed for incandescent bulbs.
If the bulb starts flickering, that’s usually a bond wire failure in an LED. When the LED heats up the bond wire loses connection and it will reconnect when it cools down again. The LEDs are in series, so if one fails, the entire bulb goes out. Flickering can also be caused by a capacitor failure in a switch mode supply, but most LED bulbs use linear regulators with a high voltage series string of LEDs now, which also increases the chance of a bond wire failure.
The early LED bulbs that cost a fortune had huge aluminum heat sinks to keep them cool. The few that I had all lasted until the LEDs got dim.
deleted by creator
The newer designs that use very long, filament-attached LEDs in a large helium filled glass bulb also work quite well, even in a classical light fixture. The helium filling helps with cooling because helium has higher convective heat transfer than air.
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.
deleted by creator
I mean yeah it’s not as optimized, but that’s not what the claim was. That’s also not exclusively an Apple behavior so I don’t get why we’re singling out one manufacturer here.
Apple doesn’t make anyone buy anything every year. They support older devices longer than most other manufacturers, so I still don’t understand your point.
iPhones and iPads famously get slower, laggier, and less useful as time goes on. This is not just because of its use because even resetting one will make it just as slow as before. Sure, as we move forward we get more demanding applications and such, but it seriously doesn’t seem like that scales properly with the ability of the hardware, almost like Apple intentionally builds in incremental slowdowns in each patch that isn’t installed on current hardware. It’s apocryphal, I know, but there have been so many people complaining about their perfectly good iDevices suddenly not performing like they used to even after a refresh that makes me feel like there’s at least something to it.
And don’t get me wrong, Android phones seem to do the same to a certain degree. iDevices are just more famous for doing it.
It happens because of two main reasons, firstly is just because of bloat - software/websites are less optimised or doing more because they expect newer and better hardware. The second thing is the intentional throttling of the hardware by the operating system in response to reduced battery life to maintain longevity. basically if the battery is at 50% original battery, to maintain 10+ hour battery life, the device has to use less power - and the way it does that is by lowering the performance of the hardware.
Yeah that’s not my experience. Maybe it’s yours and I apologize for that, but my 11 is still running like it was brand new.
Got any proof that “Apple intentionally builds in incremental slowdowns in each patch”? There was batterygate but that was a messaging problem.
Like I said, it’s apocryphal and probably has other reasons (like the one you mention), but it’s something you hear all the time about them to the point where it becomes major news and there has been some evidence presented, but as I said, it could just be newer versions of software requiring better hardware, which is still a bit iffy when you have an older phone and they want you to update to software that won’t run as optimally on it. In some ways, Android actually benefits from this by just creating security patches for the life of the phone for the older version, and not updating to newer versions of Android like iOS does for old phones.
I think people just like to pick on Apple. They support old phones for at least 5 years with software and security updates, and sometimes even longer. They’ve even been known to push out the occasional security update for devices nearing a decade old.
That’s not to say they’re a perfectly innocent company. I just think there’s an Apple hate bandwagon people like to jump on. Rather than doing that, I’d like to see people focusing on the specific shitty things they do, and giving them credit for the things they get right.
Hey man, I’m an Android dude for phones. Won’t even consider an iPhone as I dislike locked ecosystems for phones, but this is just not true.
Apple supports their devices way longer than any of the major Android producers do. I can’t remember the last time my phone was supported more than 3-4 years, but my iPad was just rock solid and updated for 6 years. Replaced it because I wanted more RAM for scrolling endlessly on Reddit, but it was brilliant for everything else. My daughter still uses it with no issues today, two tears later.
The missus’ Samsung tablet on the other hand…
What a piece of crap, and it was top of the line just three years ago.Yep. Apple supports their stuff a lot longer, but it does seem like it slows down more and more every single update.
I’m really soured on the whole portable device thing completely because I don’t like the interfaces, I don’t like touchscreen (imprecise garbage), I don’t like how locked down it is by default (Android over iOS here plus some Android devices are very hackable to the point of getting root, but still), and I hate the intense data collection and tracking these devices do to you. Even phones rooted with custom OSes still track you by its mobile radio triangulating your position.
The planned obsolescence is just another frustrating aspect to the damn things.
We agree on every point except Apple products slowing down significantly faster than Android. My personal experience has been the polar oposite.
Thanks for taking the time to reply!
In my experience iPhones and iPads are remarkable for keeping the speed up as they age.
My iPhone 6S lasted me untill 2021, and it was the battery that was the main issue, the speed of the iOS was fine
Spoiler: They won’t.
Sometimes I think people don’t understand how capitalism works…
I would love to see a car company create a vehicle platform with battery replacements central to the design of the car. Make larger packs out of smaller units so their larger models (or simply longer range models) so they only have to make one kind of pack. Recycle old packs back into making newer ones to reduce the need to mine more materials.
Sure, charge me enough on the replacement to keep this cycle going. Buying a car you know will get battery (and therefore range) upgrades as time goes on is a no-brainer.
Imagine the goodwill and free word-of-mouth advertising you would receive if you went the extra mile and open sourced all the software for the vehicle and allowed users to modify it if they wanted. Make the car not look like dogshit and I imagine you’d do well.
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
Nio
Ugh, looks like they designed their door handles just like Tesla did. Are EVs in general adopting that design standard? Cuz thanks I hate it.
Luckily no, not all do.
We specifically chose a car with normal handles because ice/snow is a bitch with the motorized/flush ones
That is very interesting and their cars look appealing.
I think in the US, a company may have a better time selling the whole car including battery and still offering quick replacement when it comes time to upgrade.
I’m about to search more but do you happen to know if Nio is selling in the US?
Edit: Dang… Not selling in the US yet. And with these new tariffs it’s not looking good.
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
so do most electronics.
but you know, line must go up.
Good luck with that. Planned obsolescence is a key ingredient in capitalism. I mean what better way to make line go up than to turn a one-time purchase into a repeat purchase? This shareholders and executives will never be able to step on the working class if they can’t gouge customers. Won’t anyone think of the shareholders?
deleted by creator
Probably not a bad thing if your primary concern is the environment.
Carsharing? Yes. Personal cars with a subscription? Not really.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
1 of the 👍 points that were brought up was artificial gatekeeping. Many techies know it but I guess many non-techies don’t know it. Phone makers intentionally not putting the newest features on old phones to boost the newest phones’ sales should be widely known. I wonder what the public opinion will be.
