Asking a warranty repair on a 9 years old oven is a bit of a stretch.
I doubt it'd fly in the EU.
I doubt it'd fly in the EU.
To quote from that article on the parent company's website:
According to the American National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) - who
helpfully released research called the Study of Life Expectancy of Home Components
- the contemporary average lifespans are as follows:
• Fridges - 13 years
• Dishwashers - 9 years
• Electric ovens - 13 years
• Gas stoves - 15 years
• Microwaves - 9 years
• Dryers - 13 years
If I buy an expensive fridge and it fails in 5 years due to a faulty component, then that is up to the retailer and manufacturer to sort out between themselves as to who wears the cost of replacement or repair.
Considering the cost of sending a lawyer attend the hearing and the potential risk of creating a precedent, it may simpler and cheaper to send an engineer when someone complains too loudly...
It’s designed so a lay person can represent themselves without having to understand the justice system.
I know in New South Wales companies have to apply for special leave to have a lawyer represent them, and they need to supply a reason why. In New Zealand lawyers are not allowed in the tribunal, a company must be represented by a manager.
If they got invited to a hundred cases at the same time, they'd send a lawyer and perhaps even would tweak the design to include some extra $1 parts which actually work.
In this case it seems to boil down to: "In the end he replaced the light bulb (which hadn't worked for years, we hadn't bothered replacing it) and the message had gone away anyway."... i.e. the guy could have replaced the light bulb when it broke and perhaps nothing would have happened in the first place. So this article comes across as complaining too much, frankly.
a failed bulb could result in a 'please change the bulb before the rest of me breaks' on the display, too.
Who knows, maybe the author has been using the oven excessively or never cleaned it etc.
So far, we‘ve heard one side only.
That's actually false. Almost all of the engineered goods are engineered to a certain lifetime. Usually companies have internal endurance testing results for every item. The ones who care about will release their expectations.
In fact, we should be able to build ovens that last a lifetime. And not only ovens, there are many appliances and gear that can easily be made to last a lifetime, except for some wearing parts. However, many companies that did this were competed to bankruptcy by cheap low quality competing products.
With the abundance of low(er) quality products, we tend to expect a shorter lifetime.
Luckily there are still a few countries at the bottom of the world with good consumer legislation.
The only exception is when people buy from a foreign retailer online. However that is a problem regardless of where the retailer is as long as they are not in your country. My daughter (in the UK) currently has a problem with Boox (in the EU) refusing to replace a product that was delivered with a faulty screen claiming that she must have damaged it.
But that price increase will go into longer-lasting parts, because that costs a lot less than needing to replace every unit halfway through the warranty period.
And since the 20 year oven is a lot cheaper to build than two 10 year ovens, the per-year price to the consumer will go down.
≤ € 199 2 years
€ 200 - 299 3 years
€ 300 - 399 4 years
€ 400 - 499 5 years
€ 500 - 599 6 years
€ 600 - 699 7 years
≥ € 700 8 years
On one hand this seems rather short to me, on the other hand, it's kind of a "you get what you pay for" affair. I don't really know what profit margins manufacturers have, but when I worked for a store profit margins for us really weren't all that big for us (and also didn't scale as much with price as many people assume).
If, however, for whatever reason you don't want that, you can't demand all your money back, but only 50%. That's only if you agree to the money though, the seller can't unilaterally choose to give you 50% back instead of repairing it.
Courts will, and have in the past, throw this table out, if you make a reasonable argument why you could expect a longer lifespan.
But yeah, it's just a guideline like I said. Some people here are throwing out numbers such as a "15 years" or "decades" with no qualifiers, and I'm not sure if that's reasonable for a €230 oven (cheapest in a quick check).
Aside on retailers: I haven't worked in a store in 15 years, but back then a lot of manufacturers just said "lol fuck you" when you tried to claim warranty above their stated warranty period. It was typically up to the retailers to bear the costs. One (of several) reason we left the consumer business: it's hard to compete as a small independent store for many different reasons, and this just made it that much harder. You can't spread out the costs, and you have almost no leverage against Asus or HP.
In short, at least back then the manufacturers could just keep shipping wank without really suffering too much damage to their bottom line, and the retailers with essentially no power to change anything were getting screwed. I don't know if that's changed, but probably not.
Yes, it gets often quoted, but things don't become true by being often repeated. It probably wasn't the Consumentenbond, as they actively call out the list from Techniek Nederland (previously Uneto-VNI) as being too short on their website.
[1] https://www.consumentenbond.nl/nieuws/2016/consumenten-hebbe...
200 euro also says nothing: 200 euro for a small tabletop oven is extremely expensive, for a large build-in one it's cheap. Considering as well it's usually a build in one, you can expect to not have to change it every two years.
30 years :)
But I actually think it's fine that the warranty shorter than 9 years.
Even, if I agree that 2 years (as is common) is too short.
[0]: https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/en/shopping-internet/spa...
As long as no exotic or custom components are used they should be easy to find parts and repair too
Not that the controller board on a washing machine is particularly exotic; it's made from standard components. But each model of washing machine has it's own controller board, so the boards are low-volume, and ridiculously expensive. And the boards themselves are about as easy to repair as any modern PCB covered in SMDs.
I suspect the reason that white goods nowadays all have digital displays and digital control panels is that those "features" necessitate a proprietary controller board, which turns out (surprisingly! /s) to be the component most likely to fail.