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Comment by DrScump | Hacker News Reader

  Planned Obsolescence is largely a myth

... aside from the American auto industry up through the 1980s or so. Planned obsolescence drove automotive design for years, prompting people to pursue new vehicles every few years. In contrast, European models could go a decade with little visible change, as long retention cycles were common.

MAD magazine had a great feature in the 1970s called "Planned Obsolescence in Everyday Products", parodying design fails in household appliances and such.

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I knew a guy who lived through WWII, he was German. He came to America and bought a 50s Mercedes. When I met him in the late 90s, it had 1,000,000 miles on it. He said he changed the brakes twice and the clutch once.

Over course, I doubted him, but he went into great detail about how he had to drive in post-war Germany, as they couldn't afford replacing anything back then, so everything had to last. He was extremely careful with his down shifting, and only barely touched the breaks at the very end. Accelerated very slowly, etc...

I wonder how much WWII played in Germans making solid stuff still to this day. (and the rest of Europe)

Reminds me of the guy who drove his Accord up to a million miles[0]. Proper maintenance and showing respect for the hardware goes a long way towards hypermiling.

[0]: https://jalopnik.com/5852681/man-shows-remarkable-stamina-dr...

While it's nice to hear those anecdotes it still proves nothing. As OP said, this is survivor bias.

Are you suggesting that the life of a product does not depend on how it's used?

No, and you didn't suggest that he used it in any extraordinarily careful manner either.

His point is that what you have is a nice anecdote, and survivor bias means that you only hear about the products that ended up lasting, but not all the Mercedeses that bit the dust along the way.

> ... aside from the American auto industry up through the 1980s or so. Planned obsolescence drove automotive design for years, prompting people to pursue new vehicles every few years.

And now that everyone makes dependable cars, they simply change the headlight/taillight configuration every year to make one's car seem out-of-date much sooner.

Those infotainment centers don't help at all, either.

  they simply change the headlight/taillight configuration

One example of this: the exaggerated "tail fins"[0] that characterized late-1950s American sedans started small, then grew almost annually for a decade.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_tailfin

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