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Comment by bluescrn | Hacker News Reader

'Oldest' model supported is the iPhone 12. Very limited set of parts. Requires a device serial number.

Clearly being done very reluctantly. May be beneficial to those with a habit of dropping phones and smashing their screen, but the real problem is the slightly older phones becoming e-waste due to a degraded battery or parts like buttons wearing out.

(But we've got bigger worries with degraded batteries leading to e-waste, with Chevrolet discontinuing support for a 5yr-old EV (Chevy Spark) setting an example that others seem likely to follow. No battery replacements for your EV! Buy a new one! We're heading for a world where so-called 'green' EVs are barely repairable and thrown on the scrapheap as soon as the battery degrades)

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Automotive has a very strong track record of 3rd party parts being available shortly after genuine parts become hard to obtain or not-affordable. As long as there's enough of a given vehicle on the road to justify the cost, surely a 3rd party will create battery replacements for many EVs.

There's plenty of Leaf battery replacement services and parts as far as I can tell. The original Leaf is quite old now in EV-years.

> Automotive has a very strong track record of 3rd party parts being available shortly after genuine parts become hard to obtain or not-affordable

With the exception that the car doesn't throw error codes and disable the power windows if I use a third-party brake pad.

With the move to EVs (and perhaps even before, to some extent), cars seem to be changing, in the same way that 'computers' evolved/regressed from fairly open, upgradeable, repairable PCs to smartphones and tables with locked-down OSs, no upgrade options, and minimal repairability.

We've accepted a world of throwaway phones/tablets (with a life of maybe 2-5 years). We can't afford to accept that with EVs.

You can still very easily buy a PC which has an "open" architecture in the sense that you can plug various CPUs, PCIe cards, memory, disks, etc into it. It's in a very similar form factor to the old "open" PCs, it sits on/under your desk in a sheet metal box. That hasn't gone away, we just now also have these new things which are tiny very portable computers which are locked down and very closed.

I expect EVs which sell well will have robust 3rd party parts available for the kinds of parts that >95% of owners will ever need to replace, just like today. The EV industry is still extremely young, there will be much money to be made with 3rd party parts and repairs on EVs even if the automakers don't want it to be. I firmly believe that the market will find a way for the popular models.

> we just now also have these new things which are tiny very portable computers which are locked down and very closed

...and that need replacing every couple years not because they don't work but because we have been disallowed from replacing parts, thus generating e-waste made up of rare earths and toxic metals and at great cost to people.

Strong consumers laws have a lot to do with it. In India, an entrepreneur started an all-brand service center, and some of the auto-mobile manufacturers ganged up against him and refused to supply him parts. He took them to court and won.

Does that inclue John Deere tractors?

The John Deere tractors that get the right to repair people riled up are the big expensive computer controlled ones. It's an extremely niche market but definitely an important one as farming is extremely important to the global economy.

For the consumer level tractors which are manufactured in a volume which is more similar to automobiles, there appears to be plenty of parts in the market to fix them. Even the consumer level tractor parts with John Deere labels on them seem to just be rebranded cheap commodity parts much of the time.

>But we've got bigger worries with degraded batteries leading to e-waste, with Chevrolet discontinuing support for a 5yr-old EV (Chevy Spark) setting an example that others seem likely to follow.

The Spark is one EV from one manufacturer, introduced ten years ago, and it sold a few thousand units over a couple years. Chevy sells more Bolts in two months than the entire several year long Spark production.

The reason they're no longer selling battery packs is because there was insufficient demand for them. The car sold like shit. It is not "an example others seem likely to follow" like you claim.

Chevy included, given they're warrantying failed Bolt EV batteries and giving them 8 year warranties. Five year old bolts are getting eight-year-warrantied batteries. Weird you didn't cite that.

People have been bleating about "battery-pocalypse" - batteries clogging landfills, failing batteries "totaling" cars, blah blah - since the Prius came out twenty years ago. Still hasn't happened. If you have a Prius and the battery pack throws an error code, there are plenty of businesses offering rebuild services, looks like it's about $1k. They recycle whatever cells are still good, and bad cells are sent out to be recycled for their raw materials.

You either intentionally zeroed in on extreme outside case to push your anti-EV agenda, or you don't know much about hybrids/PHEVs/EVs and you're outside your lane while pushing an anti-EV agenda.

Which is it?

Nah, If I was wealthier I'd probably be driving a Tesla. I've probably been watching too much Louis Rossmann, but I do have concerns about right-to-repair and battery replaceability, and (possibly overblown) concerns of battery degradation - based mostly on experiences with phone and laptop batteries being essentially dead after a few years.

EVs do have real issues limiting mass adoption, though. Even if I could afford a nice one, I couldn't charge it at home (living in an apartment, can't really dangle a power cable down 3 floors).

And as I'm a very-low-mileage driver at the moment, able to WFH, keeping my boring Ford Focus running for a few more years is probably much better for the environment than replacing the entire car.

> The Spark is one EV from one manufacturer, introduced ten years ago, and it sold a few thousand units over a couple years.

Did you mean a few hundred thousand units? Wiki says there were 24,459 Chevrolet Sparks sold in the USA last year, plus a similar number of international sales. Total US sales were roughly 285,000 units[0], so that would fit with “a few hundred thousand”.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Spark#Sales

That's the gasoline version of the Spark. The EV version was considerably less popular.

This article from when it was discontinued says the entire production run was 7400 units.

https://www.thedrive.com/article/7269/chevrolet-ends-spark-e...

I can see you’re right. Thanks for the correction and the source.

>Clearly being done very reluctantly.

This solution is perfect for the PR and avoiding future right to repair lawsuits.

Doing barely enough is what I assume they're going for.

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