[MegaButts]

Are you a product manager, a marketer, an accountant, an engineer, or what? I've often been surprised to find out how the sausage is made in most businesses where I quickly learned making the best product is rarely a goal (and sometimes this is actually the right decision since you should focus on "good enough" for most applications) and that planned obsolescence is a real thing. In the case of autos, many of the dealerships in the US make most of their money on maintenance. And the dealerships have a lot of influence on what cars sell and what should be sold by their respective motherships.

[ecpottinger]

All I can say, as a person who has been interested in electric cars for some time, when I went to my local GM dealer I was surprised at how much lies he used to try and discourage me from buying a Bolt.

Worse, when he started saying there were no local charger available he refuse to do a web search to prove his point since the last time I looked there were plenty available locally.

I just walked out, on the other hand I could have bought the car CASH if he had not lied.

The dealers are more than 50% of the problem!

[happycube]

That kinda dealer/salesman would've hated you for paying cash as well...

[MegaButts]

Luckily this is very easy to circumvent. Just agree to whatever financing terms they offer, negotiate on the sale price, then pay off the car ASAP. You'll likely save several thousand dollars (depends on the car and new vs used) and, at most, pay a couple hundred dollars in interest. It usually ends up being less than a hundred but obviously each contract is different.

[hnModsRDanger]

There is definitely no planned obsolescence.

There are specifications. We don't buy overkill material.

At worst, we stop tracking issues of they are too old, like after 5 years of use.

Edit, due to HN limits. The person below me doesn't understand engineering and how specs work. You make your product at specific costs and quality. Not everything can be made out of titanium.

[MegaButts]

I'm guessing you're an engineer (please correct me if I'm wrong). And what you're effectively saying is cars aren't designed to last longer than their warranties, and in fact you don't even have data on what happens afterwards. It sounds like you're passively participating in obsolescence, even if it's not intentional. Apart from that, the people actually selling the cars absolutely have a financial incentive for the cars to fail as soon as the warranties are up, which is conveniently when you stop looking at the data.