Hacker News Reader

Comment by burnt-resistor | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of always been that way to varying degrees. In the 70's/80's, changing the Porsche 911 spark plugs required dropping the engine.

Also, in addition to planned obsolescence and repair hostility is Design for Manufacturing (DfM) that doesn't care about maintainability, safety, comfort, or durability, only lowest cost to shove things together on an assembly line. This is why there are some cars that require removing the wheel well to change the oil filter and other that have things completely out-of-order or require absurd tools to service. My grandfather was a 30 year Chrysler dealer mechanic who had a dozen or so custom tools for very specific purposes.

Source: Dad had an A/C & electrical mechanic shop next to a Porsche specialist shop.

View on HN

>Also, in addition to planned obsolescence and repair hostility is Design for Manufacturing (DfM) that doesn't care about maintainability, safety, comfort, or durability, only lowest cost to shove things together on an assembly line.

Exactly. It's basically fight club math. Spend $10 on a click-fit connector that can't be disassembled but that a $60/hr (though they only see a fraction of that) UAW laborer can plug in in half the time can't easily short-insert that can be visually checked.

The fact that it costs $200 the 1/10000 times it fails under warranty doesn't matter with those numbers. And you don't even care about the 100/100 times it fails at 2-3x the warranty period.

Of course, you're burning credibility doing this. But credibility doesn't have an obvious mapping to a number and stonk go up, KPI go up, bonus get paid, nobody cares.

There is ultimately a feedback cycle in that maintenance and reliability problems reduce used car values, and those drive lease rates. When manufacturers have trouble making the numbers work on cheap leases then that eventually hurts sales volume, but it takes many years for that effect to show up.

You can milk the public for like a decade of "shareholder value" between such time as you change things and the public wises up.

Luckily you don't have go drop the engine to change spark plugs on modern water cooled Porsche 911s, but let me tell you about changing plugs on mid-engined Cayman/Boxster platform. The 4 cylinder cars are easier but 6 cylinder cars require 3-4 different combinations of sockets and extensions and tiny European hands to really get in there.

In the 70's/80's you could fit a person in the engine bay of a Volvo. So, varying degrees of complexity and difficulty to fix things.

The red block Volvos would also run for literally millions of miles, and outside of the turbo models were pretty thrifty on gas. We've fallen a long ways.

Volvo may have fallen a long way, but US cars of that time were literal trash that 100,000 miles was about the total useful life of the car before far too much needed replaced. I'm old enough to remember how Japanese cars started taking the US by storm because of it. They sipped gas in comparison and drove forever.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com