[rwmj]

There's a reason everyone calls them mobile phones with wheels.

Edit: I agree with you and upvoted your comment which I feel was unfairly downvoted. But economics are going to win here, only a tiny fraction of the user base of cars (or phones) tinkers with them.

[binary132]

People don’t want cars they can tinker with, they want cars they can get repaired instead of replaced when something breaks….

[rwmj]

People actually want a convenient and cheap service for getting around. All other considerations can be derived from this. If it was cheaper to replace the car than get it serviced, they would replace it. Currently this is almost never the case of course, but if it happens in future, watch people switch behaviour instantly.

[bcrosby95]

> If it was cheaper to replace the car than get it serviced, they would replace it.

This is doing a lot of work but I'm going to go with a charitable interpretation. I seriously doubt that we'll ever hit a state where replacing a 2 ton vehicle is cheaper than repairing it. And if we do, I'll have to re-evaluate my charitable interpretation, because something shady is likely going on.

The crazy thing is people don't even repair things that are cheaper to repair than replace. Our countertop icemaker broke and my wife wanted to throw it out. I fixed it with 20 minutes of time and a $15 motor from Amazon.

I think the broader trend isn't what's cheapest, its what is easiest, even if its more expensive. People in large part have no idea how to repair anything they own. This mass ignorance is leading to some pretty poor market incentives.

[joe_mamba]

>I think the broader trend isn't what's cheapest, its what is easiest, even if its more expensive.

I don't think this is true. If this is the trend you're seeing it's probably because you're sampling through people with relatively high disposable income(or who don't mind endless credit card debt), who can just afford to throw away broken things when it's just a rounding error of their income.

But if you look at lower income people(with sane spending habits and financial literacy) you'll see how they first ask around if something can be repaired before they claw money from their checking account to buy something new.

My local facebook group is full of students asking if someone can fix their macbooks for cheap as they can't afford a new one or what Apple is quoting them, which is close in cost to buying a new one.

My minimum wage gf still had her barely functional Windows 7 notebook up until a year ago because she didn't feel like spending money to buy a new one if I could just keep fixing it.

Some broke people try not to buy new things if they can, but some are broke because they can't stop buying new things.

[binary132]

A lot of it does come down to a cost / benefit analysis where time preference is extremely overweighted due to an abundance of seemingly free credit and, shall we say, a tragic dustbowl famine of available cognitive resources.

[keybored]

It’s a culture of learned helplessness, which you demonstrate.

[binary132]

Excuse me? Describing people’s motives and reasoning has no bearing on my own. I’ve repaired multiple components on my own vehicle. Your mentality on the other hand is entirely typical of the reason I avoided this cesspool of a website for many years.

[binary132]

well, people want to have enough money to do what they need to do, of course, so they will choose things that they can in order to minimize cost and time spent, and increase convenience. That doesn’t mean they don’t want to own things that can be repaired. Owning repairable things is also valuable. I don’t think anyone actually wants to “own nothing and be happy”. But they might be able to be coerced into it, sure.

[joe_mamba]

>There's a reason everyone calls them mobile phones with wheels.

Which is why I'm so baffled how and why the EU has spent so much time and effort regulating batteries and charging ports for phones, but still ignores this massive issue of ease of repairability and right to repair of personal vehicles that has been plaguing car owners since the ICE days and is now only getting worse with EVs, that's costing us a lot more money than what's costing users to pay Apple to replace your cracked display and dead battery.

It feels like they just keep going for the lowest hanging fruits to score easy wins that don't impact local industry, while ignoring the entire forest behind them.

Jarvis, pull up on the central HUD how much the EU car industry spent on lobbying in the EU over the last 15 years.

[hnav]

The EU is beholden to the Germans, ease of repair would wreck the profit margins of VAG, BMW and Daimler both because of reduced after-sales profits and due to cost increases to manufacturing and engineering.

[XorNot]

The EU has scored wins there though.

The mobile phone industry turns product into landfill on a yearly or more frequent basis.

People might do a yearly model swap on a car, but the car itself stays on the road for 10-20 years.

Changing how it's built needs to be done cautiously, but also has a much longer payback period.

[markvdb]

Any electric gear with the battery as its main wear part. Ebikes. Sit-on mowers. Cars.

This is about so much more than cost. Agency, autonomy, environment, efficiency, geopolitics even.

I refuse to buy drm'ed gear. The exception is second hand where I can reliably avoid the drm with little effort. At its simplest, that means never using specific drm'ed functionality. At its most complicated, that means mitm'ing an encrypted can bus.

[com2kid]

Even older chemistry EV batteries last over 200k miles.

Given that so far in my 20 years of driving I've only racked up around 80k miles, that 200k "wear part" will out last the rest of my time on earth.

[bryanlarsen]

There are lots of parts on a car that will likely wear out faster than the battery on a modern liquid cooled large NMC or LFP lithium battery. You should be able to get over 200,000 miles on the battery. You probably won't get near that much from the suspension, etc.

[a96]

Absolute BS. Wear parts are the parts that move and EV batteries are notoriously long lived unless they're Broken As Designed (Nissan Leaf).

[soperj]

Because the masses don't drive every day, they bike and use the train.