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Comment by woopwoop | Hacker News Reader

So this article implies that a number of things that we buy previously were built to last longer, and indeed did last longer. The first few examples are kitchen appliances. In this case I don't really know, but I'm at least willing to listen. Ultimately the evidence is people responding to a thread on Twitter where he solicited complaints. Not so compelling.

But then he mentions a "hybrid sedan". Here I'm aware of the data. It's not close. Modern cars are much, much more reliable and durable than ones built at any time in the past.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/automobiles/as-cars-are-k...

[1] https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2021-us-vehi...

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There's also a survival bias in that we don't consider the appliances from yesteryear that packed up back when disco was king.

That's the smartest possible counterpoint to all this, nicely counterpointed.

This was a fun read and I agree in sentiment to the rage of all the crap from target that falls apart in 10 minutes but I feel like I've developed an ok sense if when I'm taking this risk and am less frustrated when something cheap fails. Essentially any time I buy anything but a book from Amazon or anything but cereal and vodka from Target. Ultimately I think the crapification of lowend consumer goods has just made me buy less crap, which feels good I think. I've also accepted a pretend scifi narrative in which the only kind of society that doesn't descend into anarchy is one where people are constantly buying and throwing away cheap crap.

And as an aside I have one of those crazy juicers but I stopped using it because it scares my wife and smells like burning / ozone.

Even some Amazon stuff is really good.

I used a Kindle 2 e-reader daily for ~14 years and, aside from decreased battery life, it was still great. Sadly I eventually stepped on it one too many times and the screen cracked.

I might fix it for ~$20 with ebay parts if I ever get bored enough.

Yeah this article would be a lot more interesting if there were a conspiracy to buy up all of the indestructible appliances made more than x decades ago. If they really were that much better then more of them would be around today.

Not really, since most consumers just go for whatever has the more "features" and is marketed at them.

I don't like this trend either. I was trying to buy an electric toothbrush the other month and there were so many models with different features. I'm like wtf it's a toothbrush, can it brush my teeth? Yes? Give me that one. I don't need you to tell me when to replace the brush or how long to brush for or sing me a song.

I live in Sweden and can find quite a lot of old school kitchen appliances in flea markets/thrift stores. I bought my Technivorm Moccamaster coffeemaker in one, a Bamix immersion blender, a Bosch stand mixer, all of them from around the 80s and still working 100% fine.

My 3 year old Moccamaster’s auto-off feature gave up a couple months ago. It uses a special mechanical switch—an illuminated rocker switch that physically flips and turns the carafe warming plate off after 100 minutes—that I know I could easily replace if I had the part but Technivorm insists I send the unit to them which I probably never will do because the packing and shipping is a pain and costly and because I need my coffee.

And, boy, does it make good coffee.

Planned obsolescence is industry standard, from toasters to iphones.

Downvoted? Isn't it curriculum?

It's just a subscription model for physical goods.

That old juicer from the 40s was likely expensive "industrial" equipment for restaurants. Even today, if you buy any professional appliance and only give it occasional home use it will last forever.

I enjoyed the rant nature of the essay but your comment hits the spot.

We admire the Victorian era bridge still in use but forget all the bridges that long ago collapsed, and ignore the overconstruction required of the survivors because mechanical theory was still developing at the time.

Also we used to have more single-application devices; while a juicer is often still a single-application device today, at the other extreme our phone has absorbed a deskfull of other single-application devices (and more). Usually with some improved reliability, some less, and also some loss of affordance.

>We admire the Victorian era bridge still in use but forget all the bridges that long ago collapsed,

Engineers tend to put care into building bridges that don't collapse, and have been doing so for millenia so collapses can happen, but are rare. "All the bridges that long ago collapsed" is in my opinion not all that many bridges, really [1], and lots of people remember the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse. I still remember the bridge collapse from the Northridge quake too.

Bridges are a special case of civic architecture where long durability and long reliability are taken into account that are kind of a special class, so they're probably not a great thing to generalize from.

[1] You can judge for yourself from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bridge_failures

Well I was talking about the Victorian era (emergence of iron bridge building) and indeed quite a few make that list. "Engineering" in the sense it has today didn't exist back then. Brunel was truly revolutionary in this regard, though even how he thought of it would be far from what we today call engineering.

We see this in the evolution of many technologies, from boiler explosions (especially in trains) that are pretty much unknown today to jet air travel (likewise at a rather extraordinary state of safety) and many others besides (consider the implementation and impact of vaccination).

The bridges we still have are maintained. Bridges fail all the time, but we only repair the ones we want to keep. Your link to wikipedia as proof that bridges do not fail is a case of the observer fallacy. The wikipedia article tells us of some bridges that failed, not all bridges that failed.

Gumby's point that the Victorian era bridges we still have were over-engineered is I think a good point. However we might like to say that they were well-engineered, but I bet that even they have been in a state of on-and-off if not constant repair.

Thinking back to growing up, we had an electric stove, washer, dryer, dishwasher, and refrigerator. All were purchased from '79-82 or so.

1. Stove died in about 2007 2. Washer/dryer were replaced with something "better", although they were still running in 2009 3. Dishwasher died in 2011 4. Refrigerator was replaced but still running in 2013

This was not just survivorship bias. Basically all of these appliances lasted at least 30 years. They were from good brands (Washer/dryer and dishwasher were Maytag), but I don't think you can buy an appliance today that you can truly expect to last 30 years. At the least, there will be some sort of control board that will give out after 10-15 years and won't be available anymore.

This. I don't really care about cars but for household appliances there is a clear tendency towards obsolescence.

Another data point: Just replaced a washer from the early 90s (German low-price brand, "Privileg") with one from the 2010s by a higher-priced brand (Bosch). Both were used. Reason for replacement: small top-loader for larger standard washer.

Both were obviously bought used.

The newer one broke within six months. The old, 30-year old one still works. The defect was a mechanical one, not the PCB. But notably, the still-functioning washer has no digital controls.

I know, anecdata is no data. But for this kind of appliance, I'd bet my arm that their lifetime has decreased substantially.

Bought a house in 1990 that had all of the original appliances in it from 1974. The stove died around 2000 (26 years). The Fridge died around 2010 (36 years). The dishwasher died in 2012 (38 years).

We started renting that house out in 2010 and bought a different house that had appliances that were about 7 years old (based on what the previous owner had told us). We had to replace the dishwasher in 2012 (so it was 9 years old then) and since then we had to replace it again in 2022 (at 10 years). Had to replace the fridge in 2014 (11 years).

You can, it's SpeedQueen

> We test our commercial quality machines to 10,400 cycles or roughly 25 years of life in an average household.

> You probably want to hear that we test our electronic controls to one million depressions…yes, we actually do.

https://speedqueen.com/speed-queen-difference/

You're right, that's a good option for the washer. For the rest I have no idea...

If you find other American manufacturers of quality appliances please share! I'm always on the lookout

I bought a new Maytag washer/dryer when I moved. We were so frustrated by it that we decided we would replace them and then give them away. Had friends who were interested but, they couldn't get them to work at all either. They were literally junk straight from the factory. We had them serviced under warranty as well, just a huge waste of time and money.

This has to be a race to the bottom and yeah, technically somehow it did sort of wash our clothes, but it was a huge hassle.

> Modern cars are much, much more reliable and durable than ones built at any time in the past.

Forget "durability" - safety is paramount. Those old cars were tanks, simpler, last longer and easier to repair but absolute death traps and dump smog.

[Edit]

Guess they didn't last longer, either way I'm happy to leave behind the cars of yester-year... even the 90's a bit sketch (though WAYYYY better).

They were simpler and easier to repair, but they absolutely did not last longer.

On average they didn't (oh no, that repair costs more than the "car is worth" as if that's a metric that actually means anything) but it was far easier to keep one running indefinitely. You could take an engine to a small machine shop and get the head and block resurfaced, valves reamed and cylinders lapped. Without any electronics to fail it was just a block of metal that was slowly losing material and a quick hit with a file could even out any imperfections leaving it like new, just with very slightly more displacement.

Modern engines are way more reliable because they have coatings and materials that will last nearly indefinitely in most parts of the engine but they're built on proprietary sensors and electronics that need a steady stream of replacements and secret software to debug.

We could make cars last indefinitely from a supply chain perspective, but commoditizing software and electronics would make them very marginally more expensive. We absolutely can't have that because, drum roll for the 1000th time, 99% of the population doesn't give a flying fuck and wants cheap shit at all costs.

As someone who drives an “old” Honda 2006, I’m surprised that this machine is still running very good. I could just take it to my local shop and had it fixed in 1-2 days. Based on my logs, I took the car for repair on average of 3-4 times a year.

I am looking to purchase a new family vehicle in the future but with all the softwares, screens, and fancy stuffs I am not sure if I liked it. Anyone feels this way?

I really wish there was a new car that I wanted to buy, because my 1998 Jeep isn't getting any younger. But holy crap is the modern car a dumpster fire of shit from a UI perspective. Although it looks like at least some manufacturers are starting to take note: https://futurism.com/the-byte/car-touchscreens-buttons-back

My car has physical buttons for climate control, volume, lights, etc but also a nice sized touch screen for CarPlay. I got the last year before VW took away the steering wheel buttons with capacitive replacements, though it sounds like they too are waking that back.

Yes that article sums up my feelings on the modern car. But my main concern are the repairs 5-10 years from now. It’s crazy to think that a car would be recalled by just some software glitch if that’s what I read is correct.

> I’m surprised that this machine is still running very good

I'm not. It's a Honda.

This isn't specifically about Honda quality, but I think it's a nice Honda anecdote.

My wife bought a used Accord before we got married. Eventually it died on the highway and we had it towed to the dealer. The engine needed to be replaced because of the failure of a part that had been recalled (when it was owned by the previous owner) had not been replaced. Since it was due to a recalled part, Honda replaced the engine for the price of the oil.

We bought Hondas for the next 20 years after that. We still own a 2012 Accord that my son is running into the ground. Our current car is a Volvo, lots of nice features, but I think our next will be a Honda.

The engine of my 2006 Honda hasn’t had any major issue besides from oil leaks, and busted air coolant pipes, etc., minor stuffs. I guess the most important stuff is that to have its yearly complete maintenance.

My Acura (up line Honda) was nice, but Honda has been really slow with the EV transition, so I left them for my next car even though I liked their quality. Hopefully they make the EV transition eventually.

My 2017 CRV started bricking itself, of course right at the 5 year warranty mark. something was wrong somewhere and the electronics & sensor system didn’t know where so it was designed to shut all the electronic systems off, like cruise control, emergency braking, road departure mitigation, etc. etc.. about 20 different sub-systems, each one got it’s own separate loud annoying beep in succession every time the car started.

We took it to the dealer many times, and they couldn’t figure out what was wrong either. That didn’t stop them from trying, by replacing whatever part was their best guess and charging us for the new one plus labor. During our final visit to the dealer, only a few blocks away, the car broke down. It limped, smoking, to the dealer where they found the AC compressed had seized causing the timing belt to melt, which then took out the alternator and several other components. After a $5,000 repair and assurances the problem must be fixed, we took it home and had a nice month’s worth of driving, and then it started bricking again. We couldn’t sell it fast enough, what a nightmare.

To their partial credit, Honda later reimbursed half the repair cost, and the dealer admitted the vehicle failure was design flaws that were out of our control. We also found out after the repair that the AC compressor had been recalled, but unfortunately the new one didn’t fix the problem.

Tl;dr I did before I bought it, but I personally no longer believe Honda to be more reliable than any other brand. One major problem across the industry now is that they know how to make good reliable engines and powertrains, but none of them are any good at computer software reliability, and computers have very suddenly taken over all critical systems in the car.

There's a few tricks to know for each model. I got a mid 2000s ford with a by all accounts unbreakable engine (600hp possible on stock internals) but the radiator and trans cooler is the same unit and often cracks pushing coolant into the trans. First thing i did to it was to buy an aftermarket external trans cooler for my specific model and install it.

Repair 3-4 times a year or oil changes/consumables? How many miles does this honda have, age is not a good indicator over miles.

If you are really having this car repaired 4 times a year for 18 years (72 repairs) this doesn't sound like a reliable machine. A modern Toyota or Honda can go many years with 0 repairs, just consumables.

Most are not engine repairs, just some wear and tear on some parts. I live in Southeast Asia where roads are mostly shit.

You can have that level of quality and care for the entire car, not just limited to the drivetrain and electronics, and it's probably even in a showroom right now waiting for buyers, just at your nearest Rolls Royce dealership.

I would not expect RR to be particularly high quality, due to:

1. Small production batches,

2. Low typical usage - most RR owners do not use it to commute on a daily basis, hence do not face high reliability requirements,

3. The ability of the typical buyer to overspend on maintenance, whether preemptively or on-demand.

Small production batches are absolutely required for high quality (see Toyota, TQM)

But there isn't enough overall volume to ever get the kinks worked out.

That's only if they don't QC every single part, for every single car, coming from new suppliers.

Which RR would do to avoid the obvious problem, only after a supplier has been verified to be sending only the highest quality product, would they ease off.

The simplest thing is that the supplier charges double or triple the unit price such that they can accept half the parts failing inspection and getting sent back.

It's more than just QC. When you make 3M cars per year, you get a lot of data points about what fails, and you you feed that back into new designs. You also nail manufacturing tolerances. When you make 4,000 (and a lot of those won't see the same mileage as a Honda), there aren't as many opportunities to find these issues.

Or another way: you an QC a bolt to death, but that doesn't tell you if it's undersized for the design.

Yes it does when there are several stages of prototypes and engineering builds before the actual production vehicle is shipped to customers... and the hundreds of other mechanisms and systems that major automakers use nowadays. I mentioned QC because it's the first screening for arriving parts, not the only thing that occurs.

Do you not know how car manufacturing works?

Anyways you don't have to take the quality of RR parts on my word if you still think it's impossible, just go a showroom and inspect it yourself.

Design iteration is typically a long tail phenomenon - new issues keep coming up as the system (car) faces new scenarios.

Even a high-resource prototyping program can only go so far with scenarios like - wear and tear/part fatigue, adverse environmental conditions, local peculiarities (e.g. regulatory requirements for uncommon configurations), unintended but common maintenance mistakes etc.

For example, a Fiat car my family owned suffered a cascade drivetrain failure after about 9 years on the road. I don't think a prototyping program could have captured that ahead of time.

The fact that the showroom RR parts look fine only indicates that the parts are ok immediately after manufacturing; it does not promise they'll work fine after several years even if treated will.

> Design iteration is typically a long tail phenomenon - new issues keep coming up as the system (car) faces new scenarios. Even a high-resource prototyping program can only go so far with scenarios like - wear and tear/part fatigue, adverse environmental conditions, local peculiarities (e.g. regulatory requirements for uncommon configurations), unintended but common maintenance mistakes etc.

Which is why automakers typically recommends a maintenance schedule that catches the vast majority of potential failures before they occur on the road.

How does this, or anecdotes of your family's Fiat, relate to engineering and verification practices of parts coming in from suppliers?

Rolls Royces are becoming reshelled BMW mechanics and electronics.

Check this out where the clock spring is the same as a bmw part and just the knobs are fancier (and swappable!):

https://www.reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/18m5...

It’s the old fuel injection vs carburetor debate. Do you want something that usually runs for 200k miles without a single problem, but takes a fancy shop to fix? Or do you want something that needs a complete rebuild every three months and needs to be retuned for your ski trip, but can be repaired by a high school boy with a tongue depressor, a q-tip, and a hammer?

The rapid exodus of carburetors shocked and dismayed many right-to-repair folks, but I think we now see with laptops and cell phones that all else equal, consumer preference strongly favors trading repair headaches for the otherwise more compelling product (thinner, faster, lighter, more powerful, etc)

I think you can have it both ways honestly. A TBI setup with a wasted spark ignition is at least as easy to work on a carburetor, with little or no extra complexity and way less headaches, while removing a lot of the problems older stuff had (no points, condensers and caps going bad, no need to mess with the jets, etc.). You can have it both ways, the manufacturers and consumers just have to give a shit.

One thing I suspect has tipped the scales in favour of less repairable products is the massive decline in social capital.

30-40 years ago, if your lawnmower broke down you'd ask Dave from two doors down to come and have a look at it.

Now, you'd either take it to a professional repairman (and get it back 2 weeks and $100+ later), try to work it out yourself via online tutorials, or just throw it in the bin.

Either way, it's far more painful for a product to bee temporarily out of service these days than it once was.

What's responsible for that decline in social capital do you think?

Personally, I have no idea, and don't think you could even pinpoint a single cause.

There's a book that goes over it called Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, but that is two decades old now and clearly didn't capture everything.

It's been captured, packaged, and commoditized. Dave's time doesn't belong to you anymore, it probably doesn't even belong to himself.

There’s clearly some of the baumol effect at play. The small engine repairman hasn’t gotten much more productive, which is part of why it’s so expensive to hire out repair.

IMO the reason we need better right-to-repair laws is because it's pretty hard to think about repairability at buy-time instead of at "when-it-fails"-time. Even more since companies that used to be good in the repairability front aren't necessarily still.

My backup commuter vehicle is a inexpensive (but modified) off-highway motorcycle for exactly this reason.

Sure, you have to have a small 'bug-out bag' (in this case a belt pack) with spare parts (bolts, belts, master links etc.) and some critical sockets if you want to take a ride without fear, but beyond that the thing is a tank. Even the most critical of problems can be fixed for minimal expenditure at Harbor Freight and/or a local motorcycle parts shop.

Aside from being fun, and confusing people every time they see it in the parking lot next to the Tesla/Rivian/Mercedes AMG crew, it is serious peace of mind that I've always got motorized transport that won't fail me.

Depends what era of cars we're talking. There's a ton of stuff from the 90s and 2000s like GM trucks, that I strongly suspect will be on the road longer and in greater numbers than stuff 10 years newer. The mid to late 90s and early 2000's seems to be the sweet spot where fuel injection and simple electronic ignition, and stuff using older designs (engine's, etc.) that had to be built heavier, combined with better metallurgy, better oils, better gas, and so on, meant that the vehicles, when taken care reasonably, would go well past a quarter million miles. There's a ton of stuff now, that given much weird crap is on there and how much stuff is done to squeeze every last MPG out (like a lot of GDI setups, auto start/stop, transmissions that pull into neutral automatically at a stop, etc.) that I really doubt will make it as far. Even as far as repairability, a 90's 4L60E or 4L80 can be repaired way, way more easier by way more people, in an economic fashion than a lot of later transmissions (that you may as well just throw away). I'm sure this holds across other brands too; Volvos come to mind, as the older rear wheel drive red block cars were certainly far better built, more reliability, and had an unbelievably better lifespan than the absolute garbage Volvo has put out after Ford bought them.

They didn't last longer.

https://auto.howstuffworks.com/under-the-hood/diagnosing-car...

Well, they do (present tense) last longer in the sense that they’re still around and working, which of course doesn’t mean newer cars are worse. It’s a bit like saying someone who’s 70 lives longer than someone who’s 7.

I think newer cars seem to be more reliable but older cars probably lasted longer than you think, it’s just that your view is skewed due to the market you’re used to (reading your link, while a million miles is a lot, though not unheard of for a taxi, the mention of 17 years as if that’s and old car is something I find surprising.

It’s common where I live to see cars from the 60s or 70s still being driven. And I don’t mean maintained classics (though those exist too), I mean just old rusty cars that still work.

All this to say that while you’re most likely right about newer cars being more reliable (and they’re certainly safer, which is more important), that doesn’t mean older cars stopped working after 20 or 30 years, it just seems your view is skewed because you live in a place where a 17yo car is considered old.

The population of old cars that you see driving around today is very different from the population of old cars that ever existed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

I didn’t mean to say all old cars lasted longer but I can see that it came out that way. I just wanted to point out that some are still around, and further, the US is probably not the best market for a study on car lifetime since it seems most people change their cars when they’re still far from being EOL.

An AMC Gremlin came out in the 1970s, and you don't see almost any at all because they were complete crap.

Especially the 70s US cars and somewhat later were complete shit and lead to the meteoric rise of Japanese cars in the US. Almost nothing US built those days got close to 100k miles without massive amounts of rebuilding.

The Gremlin is probably too extreme an example (and as someone not from the US, I’m only aware of it because it became the Butt of jokes in US TV and movies), but I still agree with your larger point.

In my country the closest example for those years would be the Alfa Romeo, which led to a popular saying here in the 80s that an Alfa made you happy twice: when you bought it, and when you sold it!

>It’s a bit like saying someone who’s 70 lives longer than someone who’s 7.

It's more like saying that someone who's 7 && depends on factory-only parts, processors, and software, that wont be available in 20 years, with ever more complex designs being pushed in between, will not make it to 70.

Yeah those old timey pedestrians didn't stand a chance. Seriously though good point I think, but what about crumple zones?

Well, the explanation that people are getting exactly the dirt-cheap shoddy crap they demand is correct.

You can buy a nice burr grinder from a company that not only sells spare parts for at least 5 years after they stop selling the model, but who also shares youtube videos on how to disassemble and repair the grinder. Mine is 11.5 years old and I replaced the central gear when it stripped around year 7 or 8, after grinding 2-3 coffees a day, probably 150+ kg of coffee, for that time. However, it wasn't cheap, and people appear not to care. Baratza, btw.

I mean for myself buying a cheap burr grinder is probably all I'd ever need, that said I've never chased quality coffee and don't care about it much.

For myself I do the 'harbor freight' tool buying method. I buy a cheap whatever first, and if it's something I find useful and demand higher quality then I more research into what quality is with at least some experience.

This said, I've also had a lot of cheap tools that have effectively lasted far longer than expected so crap doesn't always fail fast.

Lidl/Parkside here in Europe seems to be the perfect example. Never been disapointed by one of their cheap products. They're always performing and seems built to last. My little Parkside vacuum cleaner is still doing strong 10 years after I bought it while my 5yo expensive as hell Dyson operates intermittently now and is just screaming for a new battery every time I launch it. More expensive products are also prone to software tricks and planned obsolescence... and unfortunately sometimes just plain crap that capitalize on their good reputation from the past.

Well… It depends. Lidl launched a range of good quality cordless tools under the Parkside Performance moniker last year. The 20V screwdriver and drill seem like solid pieces of work, and are holding up well in my tiny shop. Those are good, and I recommend these to anyone.

But many of the plain Parkside branded tools are utter crap. The oscillating sander with exchangeable triangular, rectangular, and circular attachments I got was made of way to little material to be useful. The plastic struts for the attachments (the process of swapping those being horribly inefficient) partly melted with use.

The Parkside drill press I have isn't too bad, but I had to fix a mechanical failure where the part which connects the manual up-down thingy to its gear just sheared off because it was a tiny rolled piece of metal sheet instead of a solid piece of 4mm diameter steel. I fixed that (replacing that bit with part of a bolt tapped into the axle) and it is doing fine now, but still.

Baratza owner here echoing your sentiment.

There's still plenty of manufacturers out there today offering quality products, but in almost every market there are clones and cheap imitations.

The poor man pays twice is a motto I often recall as I grit my teeth and hand over my credit card for appliances.

I think your survivors bias thing is very true. I've used old things which would survive nuclear blast, and still have some. And, old things which were gimcrack rubbish and unusable.

Some old plastics de-polymerised badly in heat. A lot of old chrome and tin plating corrodes. Bone handled cutlery is not designed for dishwashers. Sure, the mix master is going strong but it was gold plated when my mother in law got it. Same with the cast aluminium mincer.

That said, I fixed a 24 year old magimix by replacing the motor starter, everything else is fine except its on its second polycarbonate bowl since dishwashers: now only washed by hand.

My Stihl shopvac finally crapped out. Not sure how old as it came with the house. I went to the Stihl shop to see if they had replacements and they asked me what museum I pulled it from. No replacement motor but still replacement filters so now it's a prefilter for my new Stihl shopvac.

Tried Stihl direct? In any case, a second life as a preclean isn't such a bad end. Or, you could use it to clean the filters on the new one and prolong its life.

> Modern cars are much, much more reliable and durable than ones built at any time in the past.

I continue to buy older cars because this has been false for me everywhere I've experienced new cars (borrowed, friends, my own).

Pointing out lack of data to support an argument that relies on anecdotal evidence is good practice. However:

- The anecdotal evidence is strong amongst older people

- Data not existing doesn't mean it _can't_ exist

I suspect that younger people are just used to things not working, so they don't complain. Then there's the fact that there is no incentive for anyone else to show things could be better (except the old codgers like myself, but we're not a profitable demographic).

I scour online auctions for old gear, because I know it'll work. Hi-Fi systems built in the 90s for example, were the panicle of hi-fi. Heck, I even have a CRT from _thirty years ago_ that still works like new (now think of your smart T.V. in thirty years).

Forget that, is there anything you've bought new in the last _ten_ years that you still have?

Of course the old cars you can still buy now are the reliable ones, because the unreliable ones have long been scrapped

That, is an excellent point. However, the very reason I buy in them in the first place is that they proved themselves to me _at the time_. Believe it or not, what I'm saying is I never had a bad experience with cars from the 90s, in the 90s.

The prices for 80s-90s 4wds like the Toyota LandCruiser and Nissan Patrols are climbing like crazy... Nissan even still make the 1990 model Patrol (GQ/Y60 frame) for the UN and Saudi Arabia.

You never owned a 90s Chrysler product I'm taking it? Absolute complete garbage.

The difference in body rust in winter climates with road salt is incredible, IME. Many cars from the 90s and early 2000s just absolutely fell apart.

I live in a place with real winters and road salt and I can assure you that modern cars are plenty corroded by 5 year mark if they weren't treated additionally post manufacturing for it.

I fitted a RasPi with mpd and a USB sound stick into a tube radio from 1958 that happily plays in our kitchen day by day, can stream live or NAS (important feature having children) and I just love the tube sound.

http://imgur.com/a/r834D

For the cars, I think it depends, possibly even on your luck. My car is old enough to vote, and aside from one simple repair I could do in 15 minutes in my parents' garage with a part that was sold by the dealership for 60 €, it only ever needed changes of consumables. Hell, even the scheduled maintenance at the stealership costs a song, cheaper than my motorcycle.

My dad's cars from the same era didn't fare so well and all required heavier repairs; none still work.

Also, since we're talking anecdotes, my parents have thrown out all their CRT TVs and monitors because they've all failed in some way (I've personally never had any). And I'm typing this on a Dell LCD monitor from 2015 or so that still kicks ass and has great picture, even by today's standards. My 2013 MBP still has a working, good-looking screen, and it's been on the road a lot.

> Forget that, is there anything you've bought new in the last _ten_ years that you still have?

Yup, almost everything [0] still works like new, even my 2013 MBP which I've carted around a lot. It's not powerful enough anymore, so I have a new daily driver, but it still works. Hell, my gaming PC was bought circa 2013, and only had a new GPU 3 years ago (was bought for server work initially, so only had the cheapest GPU I could find). Still rocking the original SSDs, PSU, everything. Ditto for my wireless headphones I bought around 2018. The battery life is still good, the sound hasn't changed.

I've mostly lived in rental apartments, so I don't have any anecdotes about household appliances.

So not really sure what can be concluded from our anecdotes.

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[0] The only thing that broke was an MS Sculpt keyboard, which broke down after 4 years of daily use.

> Forget that, is there anything you've bought new in the last _ten_ years that you still have?

My flatscreen TV and the sound bar that came with it. My daily-driver computer. My Samsung Galaxy S3 which I still use daily for some tasks, works fine. My washing machine. My Kenwood stand mixer.

All around 10 years, all working fine still without repairs.

That's just the things I could think of on the spot. There's very few things I've had to replace that were broken. Most things I've replaced because I wanted newer features, and have sold or given away the old item.

I'll concede that my previous lawn mower falls in your category. It had a plastic bushing on the main shaft, which got torn up over time, and destroyed some other parts when it held a retirement party.

I think there is some truth and reasoning to your point and there is a missed point also: peoples’ desire/ability to repair broken modern appliances.

An example of this is my mother’s cooker. She has had it for 15 years now and it is still going strong/only cost £300 when bought new.

The main reason for this is the simple fact I’ve gone and repaired it when something on other failed. One repair was a power box — cost me £15 and 30 minutes.

Two other repairs were heating filaments (one for the main oven, one for a job). If I remember correctly the total cost of the filaments was roughly £75.

This is one example but I can think of many others where I have repaired appliances for friends and family when their initial reaction was “it’s broke, nothing lasts now, I need to buy a new X”.

>Forget that, is there anything you've bought new in the last _ten_ years that you still have?

GPU

My $20 Mr. Coffee my dad got me before I went to uni is about 9 years old, went through daily use for about 5 of those, stored outside for 2 years, has no problems.

I think people buy cheap weird shit and are surprised when it breaks but if you buy simple cheap shit it tends to work until you physically break it - I expect my enameled lime hand-squeezer to last basically forever also since I don't dishwasher it.

From [1]: ”after three years of ownership”

While I generally agree with you, that data isn’t very conclusive.

JD powers also need to be read carefully to not put all problems in the same basket. Malfunctioning engine vs “Bluetooth pairing was laggy with my 8 year old android phone” can be counted in same basket if you don’t look carefully.

This brings us to the next thing which is that both expectation and complexity on todays cars are thousand times higher than 20 years ago, both from customers and emission agencies. Given that, it’s amazing how well they still work. Often better than older models.

This puts cars in its own exceptional category that is much more difficult to compare. Where’s a freakin juicer, a ballpoint pen or a pair of gloves has no additional expectations today compared to 1940. They just got worse.

Wow, a cited source about modern vehicles being much more reliable, let's check it out!

- I click the link; it's a press release from JD Power which I thought is pretty well known to be a corrupted institution that more or less just sells off awards to whichever manufacturers want to pay the most for them. Oh well, let's give it the benefit of the doubt and read the actual study which surely has data to back their assumptions.

- The study isn't actually linked anywhere for me to review

- There's a link to " learn more" about the study. I click it, and it's another press release about the study. It has a download button at the top, surely this must be for downloading the study. I click it, and it's a 1 page PDF of the press release with no actual details.

- At this point I can click a link to go back to the original press release but nothing to actually read the dang study.

All checks out I guess, modern cars are more reliable!

Even if I did actually find the full "study" I can absolutely guess that it's entirely based on trash data like random surveys of consumers and would be near worthless without having a single real data point around how often cars/parts break down.

>So this article implies that a number of things that we buy previously were built to last longer, and indeed did last longer

Anecdotally, I've lost count of modern kitchen appliances such as blenders, coffee makers, cooking "processors", that have died on me. And not cheap either, basically mid-tier stuff. Any such device with extra digital "smarts" and a monitor in particular is a huge red flag.

Whereas I still have some inherited such electric appliances from the 70s and 80s that still go strong (and whenever they did, they're totally fixable).

instead of buying home consumer appliances, i would elect to purchase appliances that are used in commercial kitchens or working restaurants.

They often only buy long lasting equipment, and the market shows it. It's hella expensive, but that's what you pay for.

I do this for my home, many of the standard, non mechanical items are the same price as one at a big box store but the quality is immensely better. We had a sandwich prep fridge at the house for a number of years and I loved it. But it was much louder and added about $30/month to the electric bill.

Speaking of kitchen appliances, we need a new immersion blender and my wife wants a cordless one. The old corded one lasted nearly 20 years, but most cordless ones have non-replaceable batteries and so are going to become junk long before the mechanical parts wear out.

For those goods which are in fact more durable and reliable (e.g. modern cars) the downside tends to be that they are less repairable.

Totally irrelevant links — the assertion was about hybrid cars, those links speak to cars overall.

The Toyota Prius debuted in the US in 2000. I’d argue 23 years is simply not sufficient to make an argument about long term reliability—particularly given that sales took a while to ramp, and any issues in, say, the first 10 years are likely to be dismissed as teething problems.

The article was about consumer goods in general, so data about cars overall is more relevant than a single brand. Nonetheless, the Toyota Prius is, by reputation, a very reliable car. Here a used car website used it's data to estimate car model's lifespan, finding that a Toyota Prius has a potential lifespan of 250000 miles, much greater than anything from the 1980s.

https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/cars-that-will-la...

Not to get too deep into this, in the 80s cars were crap. That is based only on my own personal experience. But I have no idea how reliable cars made 70 years ago were (like the kitchen appliance mentioned in the article). I've seen really old cars still on the road, but those are probably owned by collectors / people that take effort to preserve those types of cars.

Cars made in the 40s and 50s were very unreliable, required significantly more maintenance than modern cars. You had to service things like breaker points, batteries and carburetors every few thousand miles. Most modern cars can go 10,000 miles between checkups and major components can go 100k+ miles with no work needed.

In the UK, the Prius seems to be used very widely by taxi companies. In fact most of the Prius's I see are in taxi company livery. To get the best out of a Prius (or, I guess, any hybrid) you should drive it non-aggressively, avoiding steep accelleration and braking. That may have something to do with the longevity of the Prius.

I've owned two Toyotas, neither ever broke down, and one of them saved my life (in a crash). If I were in the market for a car, I'd get a Toyota.

> Toyota Prius > argument about long term reliability

But you can tell a bit about their long term reliability by looking at heavy users like Taxis and Ubers.

The Prius is used because it is cheap, cheap to run, and cheap to maintain -- even by outlier users like Uber drivers (also note drivers are usually buying consumer versions).

Arguing about 23 years is a strawman - which would mean you could never buy anything new because new models haven't yet had even a few years of usage prediction.

N=1 ... we're still running my mothers microwave, which she must have bought in the 1980's ...

We could get rid of it ... but it just works. Hope we're not radiating ourselves!

I couldn't imagine a modern microwave lasting even nearly that long.

I'm also running a 2005 Toyota, and a 69 Bug ... cannot imagine any modern car doing the service they've done, and reliably so.

Top Gear had a few episodes with old vs new comparisons. Needless to say the not-so-old classics were destroyed by average modern cars quite often [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw-zCsybNtg

I was just talking to my wife the other day about smaller items that are not being built to last. You can clearly see in products these days the built in capitalism. We’ve reached a point where I wonder how much more they can milk it. Making things smaller, reducing quality of parts, reducing thickness or length of parts and so on… that day we had experienced:

A board game where the plastic has been made thinner and thinner over years until the game really doesn’t function now.

A game where you drop a marble in a cylinder on top of plastic rods that slot in sideways and the game is to remove the rods and whoever drops the marble loses… well these rods were so flimsy they didn’t hold the marble up.

Survivorship bias. People look at old things today and say stuff biult long ago lasted longer. But that is only because all the junk from then isnt around anymore. What we have now is only the most durable stuff. Want to see what stuff was like in the past? Try working with knives made without stainless steel, when not cleaning your kitchen knife immediately meant a rust blade the next day. All those classic cars still around today? We forget all the horrible junk cars that nobody ever bothered to preserve.

> Modern cars are much, much more reliable and durable than ones built at any time in the past

May I know the timeframe and your experience on which you base the conclusion?

Been driving for last 35 years. Every newer car is crappier in every possible way - comfort, speed, durability, quality, reliability.

It's not some subjective observations - some 40-50 years ago automakers were accomodating customers, now they accommodate numerous limitations imposed by governments to make it "safer". And I am not even touching engine limitations thanks to which we have weak motors which roar like boeing at 5k rpm but still doesn't help to move car forward.

Cars made in 70-80s easily work for 40 years, if managed properly and made by nissan, mercedes-benz, toyota and sorts. Good luck modern garbage to live slightly longer than warranty without majour issues.

> limitations imposed by governments to make it "safer".

You have scare quotes there for some reason, but by pretty much all accounts cars now are so much safer than before. Like to an insane amount, over a 50% reduction in chance of fatality since the 70s/80s.

> we have weak motors which roar like boeing at 5k rpm but still doesn't help to move car forward.

And again it's working. Efficiency has increased even more than safety, with new cars getting over double the fuel economy even accounting for the larger cars!

I find it very wrong to attribute safety to a car rather than a driver. Sure, makers did good marketing selling general populace this notion.

Safety cones from driver knowledge how to avoid dangerous situations and hedge risks. “Safety” comes from useless bells and whistles, which give impression of “intelligent” system.

Bot sure what you mean under efficiency - at my books efficiency is how fast i can get from point A to B with minimal expense. Low engine volume cars lose it at every point

Fuel economy at the expense of letting me accelerate it seems. I have to turn on sport mode to safely merge onto the highway.

Exactly. There is no fuel economy since you still have to pump it to 5-6k rpm and no safety as well since it may cost you life when you have not enough power during overtake.

Sport mode on some cars is so lousy implemented (some SEA market toyota for example) that it's not even a solution.

Im very new to cars but I dont believe you at all

My first car was from 2004 and I've been envy of many features, especially "security" ones of modern cars like cornering lights or QoL stuff like reversing camera that I had to mount as customization.

Lol, you don’t have to believe me, it will come with experience.

The F150 I grew up with only lasted to 130k miles. To make that feat, it needed an engine rebuild, transmission replacement, air conditioner repair, alignments, power steering repair, numerous other minor repairs. The dash had cracks from the sunlight. The paint faded without clear coat. The fuel gauge didn't work. The windshield leaked.

Our modem vehicles are virtually new by comparison with only oil changes and replacement of wear items. The leather seats have some wrinkles and the floor carpeting looks worn.

I used my parents 30 year wedding present Maytag as a washing machine. It never really broke I just finally got a new one. I'm sure it was used from 1960 until about 1995.

Of course, cars and engines in particular are more durable today. This is due to technological progress. Cars weren't designed to be unreliable back then, they were unreliable because they couldn't do any better. Two or three years ago, I bought a pair of headphones for 200 euros that looked pretty high quality. They're now so broken that I have to hold them together with gaffer tape. Soon they'll be rotting (or not rotting) in some landfill. It's common knowledge that everyday objects are now deliberately produced in such a way that they don't last long. That's not a conspiracy theory.

Latest earphones from Apple has degraded considerably. My old Apple earphones with jack just died this year but it’s 5 years old.

Right now, their earphones lightning won’t last a year anymore. I have been buying it yearly for 3 years now.

I've got a pair of sennheiser headphones from 2011. Work just amazing, despite a decade+ of abuse. Only downside is the pleather on the ear caps wore off, but it's super minor.

I bought another pair back in I want to say 2019, and it's been just OK. The inline mute broke, but everything else about them seems just as quality (no pleather ear caps tho - just fabric which I think is an improvement).

In between those purchases, I've bought a handful of other headsets, all around 50-120$. They were universally crap. Either shit cables, shit comfort, or just wore out really fast.

Anyway, long story short - you can get some lasting quality products. It's super hard to tell when a brand has sold out to the capitalism devil though.

> Here I'm aware of the data. It's not close. Modern cars are much, much more reliable and durable than ones built at any time in the past

Is... Is this a joke? My 1991 vehicle made before planned obsolescence has a few questions...

> Modern cars are much, much more reliable and durable than ones built at any time in the past

Bullshit.

Mercedes-Benz W123.

Which was contemporaneous with the Yugo, so the Yugo is also a reliable and durable car? Or is it possible that there have been better and worse cars since the dawn of auto manufacturing?

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