Hacker News Reader

Comment by bink | Hacker News Reader

I don't really get the criticism of spare parts availability. Obviously that's incredibly frustrating for people who need service, but it seems unrealistic to expect a vehicle manufacturer who is producing only hundreds of cars per year to keep a surplus of spare parts around for every possible part. Each part they keep in surplus is potentially one less car out the door. It's one of the risks of being an early adopter.

View on HN

If the manufacturer doesn’t have spare parts to repair vehicles, customers can trigger state lemon laws. In California that means either refunding the full purchase price or replacing the car entirely.

That’s what the lemon lawsuits mentioned in TFA are about. Without spare parts, entire sales get nullified and the refunded cars can’t be resold as new.

Yeah, in CA at least the post-buyback title has the lemon status on it (can’t be removed), greatly reducing the value.

Because it is under warranty. As in, they are legally required to repair, replace, or, failing that, refund in full if there are any defects. A lack of spare parts to fulfill their legal obligation to provide a functioning product means they must either manufacture new spare parts at spot-price, provide a complete vehicle replacement, or issue a full refund. Each of these is massively more expensive than producing adequate spare parts up-front at bulk pricing.

I'm not arguing that they never manufacture parts for replacement. I'm saying that it's reasonable to expect a longer delay for parts when a company is producing 300 vehicles per year rather than hundreds of thousands. They can still assign parts to be used as replacements as they come off the line based on demand. It's just a slower process than having them waiting in shops or warehouses around the country for quick replacement.

That shouldn’t be the customers expectation - they have paid $40,000 for a car, they should expect it to be fixed as quickly as any other $40,000 car if it breaks.

If anything, as a smaller company you should be able to offer better customer service (‘do things that can’t scale’). I.E. at fiskers scale you could do this with a couple of shelving units and one person looking after the ‘spares’ department who also communicates directly to the customer.

The fact that they aren’t all over this does show either a lack of detail, a lack of cash, a lack of resource, or a combination of all three.

>but it seems unrealistic to expect a vehicle manufacturer who is producing only hundreds of cars per year

Fisker wanted to sell hundreds of thousands of cars.

If you want to sell a car, that is one of the things you, as a manufacturer, just have to do in order to get people to trust you.

A manufacturer who's cars can not be repaired isn't worth anyone's money. Also for every car there are a few specific parts which experience high wear and absolutely should be ordered in quantities to keep up with demand for repairs.

Keeping spare parts to service cars is a pretty basic and fundamental part of being a car manufacturer.

It's a basic and fundamental part of being an anything manufacturer, unless your product is so disposable they send you a new one in case of failure. Maybe the parent poster thought he would get a new replacement car if the power window switch failed.

> expect a vehicle manufacturer who is producing only hundreds of cars per year to keep a surplus of spare parts around for every possible part

That's why the article calls this "standard industry practice", not sure why you didn't get that.

I would argue the warranty is not being honored if the manufacturer who sold it to me has made direct choices that prevent it from being honored.

This sounds crazy to me. I’ve seen products with a first year or more shipping target of far less than 100 work through a comprehensive spares strategy - at multiple companies. It’s entirely manageable.

They should be keeping a surplus of components for supply chain disruption reasons, bulk discount reasons, on top of the 100% necessary customer replacement parts reasons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com