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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

One thing I’ve noticed compared to childhood appliances is plastic mechanisms (gears, actuators, brackets, etc). These tend to become brittle or soft with age or exposure to chemicals and lead to early failure. Of course metal also suffered from fatigue and there are quite strong and durable thermoplastics but today I see cheap plastic used liberally.

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Sounds like BMW. I can't believe how much plastic crap they put under the hood where the heat destroys everything.

i've got an 2000 bmw with coolant flange made of plastic, real ticking time bomb there, right against the firewall too, if it breaks I'll scrape the car coz it's in such a PITA area. They designed it that way.

This. The times I’ve fixed my appliances rather than replace them, the cause was most often a broken plastic part!

I was going to say the same thing. And it always seems to be some little thing for which having made it in metal would've had a negligible impact on price.

I had it with a car door opening mechanism - something you interact with countless times during a day. Less than an inch long. Surprised it lasted as long as it did.

There needs to be an equivalent of Choice/Consumer Reports/etc that dismantles products and calls out anything that should've been made from metal instead of plastic. It's frustrating dealing with unnecessarily broken parts.

I would pay a crazy amount of money to subscribe to a service provided by a professional reverse-engineering outfit that takes the Consumer Reports concept to the next level, with highly technical teardowns and critical analysis of a wide variety of products that covers everything from the BOM to the firmware.

This kind of thing happens sporadically -- e.g., some of the Juicero postmortems offered a lot of engineering insight. And there is no shortage of passionate amateurs like AvE who don't have a consistent methodology and/or don't always have the domain expertise needed to give a given product design a fair assessment.

What's needed is a consistent, professional, and above all objective approach to informing the purchase decisions of technically-literate consumers.

I think beyond tear-downs, it needs to be influential enough to guilt companies into going the right thing. Consumers shouldn't need to browse a detailed tear-down of an object to guess whether something has been made to last or not.

My thinking is that the people who watch it will do the influencing.

This is something I’m interested in. There are strong plastics, but a lot of stuff nowadays seems to be the cheapest plastic imaginable. Anyway to know if what you’re getting?

I don't think so. MFGs are likely to swap in new parts without notice --they may keep track through serial numbers, lots or similar, but not something they would expose to end users.

Take it apart and see? If you have experience you can usually roughly tell what kinds of plastics are used, although some are nearly indistinguishable.

Walk in to an appliance store or website, or someone's house or a car park if secondhand, with your tool kit and expert knowledge and do a full teardown on anything your considering purchasing.

Sounds time consuming.

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