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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

> But these requirements still ignore one of the biggest problems: the price of spare parts.

No, that is short-sighted.

The price of spare parts is the symptom. The root cause is that the part are highly specific to whatever they are going into, and there is a single supplier for them.

For repairs to be easy, things have to be made with generic parts that are available from multiple suppliers.

Not all parts have to be that way, just the ones likely to break, or ones that are expected to require replacement by design.

You're not going to get decent prices for spare parts, if you're vendor-locked, and there is no competition.

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Literally a whole section of TFA is devoted to this:

> Astute readers may have noticed one typical element missing from the price setting factors listed above: competitiveness.

It's hard for astute readers to read that far into something that is constantly telling them what they already know.

There are often third-party spare parts.

Some of the plastic parts on my decades old Cuisinart food processor have started to go but the motor is still great. But Cuisinart doesn't make the parts for what is almost a 50 year old appliance at this point. I was able to buy 3rd party parts for too much money but they don't fit quite right. I make do as it's not something I use that often and can make it work.

> things have to be made with generic parts

This seems tricky to legislate though. How do regulators decide which parts are like this? How do you deal with "generic parts" holding back innovation in cases where someone has invented an improved version of that part but it's not available as a generic part yet?

There are standards for sizes of screws, washers, motors, cables, plugs, sockets, ...

Just create a bunch more of those standards, e.g. for batteries, legislate their use, done. As a side effect, products become cheaper because parts will then be available off-the-shelf at economy-of-scale prices, and supply problems also become less likely because there will be numerous vendors for each part.

However, there will be two problems: some things, like cases and special moldings are hard to standardize. So I would suggest legislating that 3D-printing instructions (STL, material, finishing steps) be made available as soon as the part itself is unavailable or too expensive. And very innovative parts should be exempt for the first few years, provided they are measurably and provably better than the standardized equivalents and that a new standard is being created from them.

> There are standards for sizes of screws, washers, motors, cables, plugs, sockets, ...

Looking at my iFixit screwdriver bit set for electronics, which sports some 60+ bits and still doesn't cover everything I happen upon, I'm thinking the standards are being less than helpful here. I mean, it's good to have them, but it would be better to have way fewer equivalent options.

Most of those are not standardized according to any proper standard. They are intentionally obfuscated to make access and repairs difficult.

It’s the tension between technological progress and societal inertia at its fundamentals. Exact same argument can be applied to many areas including software. You can’t solve it. It’ll be solved when technological progress stops.

The rule should be that the total cumulative cost of all the spare parts for an appliance must be lower than 80% of the price of the appliance brand new.

The price of all the spare parts to build an assembly will always be higher than the finished product, absent some crazy imbalance of very high labor and very low parts costs. (Arguably, a block of wood that you can whittle a product out of would sell for less than the finished product, but anything mass-produced will have spare parts priced at some small multiple of the finished good price.)

Why? It's incredibly labor-intensive and logistics-intensive to track and offer one M10x1.25x12mm bolt or one main PCB for a $30 product. When I'm mass producing 5K units, I need 5K PCBs, 15K bolts, 5K upper case halves, 5K lower case halves, 5K displays, 5K buttons, etc. and I can arrange to have them delivered lineside in kits or whatever form I need and I'm pretty much going to use up everything I order in a very predictable way.

When you need 1 display and 2 bolts, I have no guarantee that I can sell all the spare parts I made and stocked, and each little fiddly item I have to have someone inventory, put away, fetch, box, pack, and ship to you. It's going to cost more or you're not going to get it. (Today, you mostly can't get it.)

This only works if you can only get like half of the assembly in spares. Otherwise, all I have to do to undercut the literal manufacturer is find cheaper labor to assemble the final product.

I like capping the cost of the replacement parts, but you have to factor in the additional labor cost of individually packaging, inventorying, storing, and shipping pieces that are going to go to final assembly either as a kit, or bulked in such a way that a spare-parts shipper cannot just part them out efficiently. So the total cost, before shipping and tax, of a stack of replacement parts to fully rebuild widget X should cost more than the fully assembled thing, but should probably cost less than 2 or 3 widget Xs.

The cost of a given part could change over time.

yeah, this logic makes sense to me

i just have no idea how you begin to create a global system of "generic parts" beyond screws and bolts in a world of globalized supply chains, with specialized production in every country.

but i also have no experience in manufacturing or repair. i'd love to hear if there are any successful case studies on the subject

There are definitely some products for which it would be doable, for example Midea makes a lot of the microwave oven models sold in the US.

> i just have no idea how you begin to create a global system of "generic parts" beyond screws and bolts in a world of globalized supply chains, with specialized production in every country.

Older cars were.

Manufacturers never designed their own brake pads, they picked a caliper design that closely fit an existing wheel.

Carburetors? Just fit one from a carburetor manufacturer (weber, etc).

Steering racks, balljoints ... many fit multiple brands.

Alternators, radiators, various water tanks ... all from a common parts manufacturer, then used in several brands. Thermostats used to be a common design too.

Hell, they don't even do their own transmissions - just get a ZF-whatever.

When Hyundai launched their gen-1 Elantra ~1990, it came with a Mitsubishi engine.

Wheel bearings, CV joints - one design fit many different brands.

The repairability of older cars was amazing in retrospect.

Today it's different - you are unlikely to find brake pads from a Ford that fits a Toyota.

The companies spent extra money on design, to make that internal part significantly different, then extra money on tooling to actually build it, just so that you cannot buy a replacement unless its from them.

> just so that you cannot buy a replacement

Conspiracy theories aside, the reason is more likely that by designing the part themselves, for a common set of applications at that manufacturer the cost is far lower than designing the rest of the car around the part.

IOW: I have 1 cubic foot available for an assembly. I can custom design an assembly for the best performance I can get in that space, or I can redesign the engine compartment to get more than 1 ft^3 of space to fit the off the shelf part into.

My experience is that, because of concerns around single-point supply chain failures, most good design operations try to use off-the-shelf components as much as possible, and only custom manufacture that which cannot be purchased externally and still achieve the desired performance. Fitment is one of the factors, but fitment is itself dictated by a lot of things (aesthetics, ergonomics, safety standards, etc etc) that factor into the overall design.

One could argue that Lamborghini could just drop a Ford Triton V10 into the Huracan and call it a day (it would save tens of thousands of dollars per car), but would that allow the rest of the car to still look like it does? Perform like it does?

Enshrining right-to-repair into law is, in my opinion, a pretty good way to make sure that field-repairability is factored into the design. But I don't think its productive to force manufacturers to use a particular design technique to achieve that requirement. That hobbles their ability to actually deliver on their design.

> One could argue that Lamborghini could just drop a Ford Triton V10 into the Huracan and call it a day (it would save tens of thousands of dollars per car), but would that allow the rest of the car to still look like it does? Perform like it does?

Well, they did drop an Audi engine in one of their cars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamborghini_Urus#Powertrain

But I can trivially easily buy replacement brake pads from any number of manufacturers. Even for a Lexus LFA (limited production supercar), I can buy pads from Bendix, FVP, Proline, and Wagner [and that's just what RockAuto carries]. For a more pedestrian 2020 Camry Hybrid, I have my choice of 57 different offerings from 13 different brands (covering both front and rear axles).

> The companies spent extra money on design, to make that internal part significantly different, then extra money on tooling to actually build it, just so that you cannot buy a replacement unless its from them.

Note that none of those were branded as Toyota/Lexus original parts, nor sold by them. If they did all that design work in order to capture spare parts sales, they forgot to do the second part of that strategy.

> But I can trivially easily buy replacement brake pads from any number of manufacturers. Even for a Lexus LFA (limited production supercar), I can buy pads from Bendix, FVP, Proline, and Wagner [and that's just what RockAuto carries].

My point isn't that aftermarket manufacturers stepped in, my point is that, with old cars, the design was close to, if not identical to, an existing caliper, even if that was from a different manufacturer.

Maybe it was because many manufacturers didn't design or manufacture their own calipers - it was done by bendix, et al. Now they spend extra money designing their own, often with no obvious benefit.

> Note that none of those were branded as Toyota/Lexus original parts, nor sold by them. If they did all that design work in order to capture spare parts sales, they forgot to do the second part of that strategy.

That's only the brake pads bit. I mentioned quite a few other components, too.

Poke around RockAuto. For a 2020 Camry Hybrid (chosen randomly), of your list of parts, the following are all available from multiple non-Toyota suppliers:

Steering tie rod ends (the part that tends to wear), balljoints, radiators*, coolant expansion tank*, washer fluid reservoir*, thermostats, Wheel bearings, CV joints (sold as full axles)

https://www.rockauto.com/en/catalog/toyota,2020,camry,2.5l+l...

* Part not from RockAuto, but available from several other aftermarket suppliers

I couldn't find an alternator for the hybrid, but I'm not sure if it has one, or if charging is part of the HSD. It's available for the non-hybrid, of course.

I turn all the wrenches on our family cars. It's extremely rare that I have to go to a dealer for a part. Like once a decade rare.

We're talking past each other.

My point is not that aftermarket parts are made to match the original, it's that in older cars the original itself was made to match something that existed.

The fact that you can get Mazda brake pads from Bendix is completely irrelevant to the fact that you now can't get Mazda brake pads from a Ford parts bin, whilst on older cars you could!

You could get 1991 Mazda Navajo brake pads from a Ford parts bin back when Ford built Explorers and slapped Mazda Navajo badges on it.

I couldn't quickly find other examples of Mazda/Ford crossover brake pads other than the badge-engineered vehicles.

Mid-century domestic cars were probably peak repairability. You can still find most parts for them today, and even build an entire drivetrain without any parts from the original manufacturer.

That said, many components of newer cars are still largely supplied by the same companies across brands.

Cars are special. Car owners are usually so dependent on them, that over the course of the ownership, they'll likely spend more on parts and repair than they originally bought the car for. Cars are in the Goldilocks zone of "any repair is, individually, much cheaper than replacing the car" plus "not having a working car quickly becomes more expensive than either". Can't think of any other product regular people own that's in similar situation.

Housing (and plumbing, electrical, etc).

> You can still find most parts for them today

Why is that?

Huge aftermarket (mainly performance), simplicity (no software), and "fanbase" (related to the performance aftermarket.)

With international supply chains, labor hours naturally flowed down to those places with cheapest labor, while maintenance hours (performed in higher standard of living countries) were chopped to basically nothing. Maintenance is where standards get enforced. While it might be possible to dictate standards to a factory in Shenzhen, the odds they're going to be built to spec is vanishingly small. So, as we've seen, far easier to just have the overseas factory build the assembly, then you can reject the nonfunctional assembly, or, better yet, have the consumer find the nonfunctional units directly. The upside of this is you can make all the components completely bespoke to the application, tightening tolerances and (with the potential of) increasing overall reliability.

In industries where maintenance still has to happen, you see these general specs still in use. ARINC is one set that I deal with every day - they publish tons - along with many various MIL-STD things.

> i just have no idea how you begin to create a global system of "generic parts" beyond screws and bolts in a world of globalized supply chains, with specialized production in every country.

As the article points out, sometimes the spare parts are extremely simple things like bolts and screws, which should really be standardized across all industries.

Things like motors/switches and other simple electric components can also be (and should be) mostly standardized. It's only once you get to circuits and complex electronic boards that you will run into issues, because they can be custom.

Most consumer products aren't complicated, and if they are, they are only complicated because the company is trying to create huge markups and prevent people from repairing items.

Exactly right! there are a whole lot of after-market part suppliers for major appliances like dishwashers, laundry washing machines etc. Some of them have a parts list and assembly schematic hidden in the machine.

Many washing machines are produced by the Whirlpool group under different brands, so it's not surprising that they would have a lot of parts in common and thus also feed a large aftermarket. Import brands like Samsung and LG tend to be much worse on parts availability and service information (and according to some statistics, also reliability.)

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