Old car headlights were all the same – which was a fairly bright idea [video] | Hacker News Reader

Old car headlights were all the same – which was a fairly bright idea [video]

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16 pointsremkop224 comments

Interoperable car parts are a terrific idea.

I like reliable old cars for this reason. Sometimes things need to be replaced, but those things are usually cheap and easy to work with. Need a new headlight? $25 at the local parts store, $50 for the LED version. You can install it with a screwdriver.

The curved, round lights on new cars look nice, but why couldn't they ask a supplier like Sylvania to settle on a few consistent options? With a new Honda Civic, you'll need to order a bespoke headlight assembly for about...$340?

https://www.go-parts.com/2222-honda-civic-headlight-assembly...

I see two sides to standardized components. One is their efficiency and lower cost. The other is they lock in technology. The Soviet Union used standardized components which made many things easy to repair. The same electric motors were used in a wide variety of machines. But it made it very difficult to innovate because it was harder and more costly to use anything but the standardized components. If you needed a new size of electric motor you had to convince a standards committee that it would be useful in a wide variety of applications. Similar to how some countries today are benefiting from starting with a mobile internet rather than a wired one, a standardized and widely adopted technology base can be a barrier. Maybe some day we'll figure out the absolute best way to make everything and we won't care so much about making new technologies. We aren't there yet though.

There's definitely a balance here. Every piece of DDR technology I have ever interacted with has flat head screws. From the point of view of interoperability and repairability, that's amazing. From the point of view of struggling with a stuck screw, it's horrible.

The capitalist approach, of discarding screws altogether in favour of glue, is even worse.

I think you could probably reach a happy medium by requiring companies to pay for the disposal of their products. That would push them to make their designs easier to repair and more long-lasting, without putting direct burdens on innovation.

A lot of the problems with capitalist design is that externalities, generally waste in various forms, are suffered by society at large. If this was 'priced in' (imagine if CO2 emissions were priced in to products!) you would have a lot of incentive for more pro-social design.

Capitalist dogma is that such things are not within fiduciary duty. The board's sole obligation is to the profit of the company.

I have no idea how to go about changing this, when bills are basically bought and paid for.

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