I haven’t looked at the statistical data on this myself, but there’s something to be said for survivorship bias.
Not to mention those old fridges are Horribly inefficient on energy
Can confirm. Use a fridge from 1974. 2 years ago thermostat failed. Replaced with digital one for $15. Now have a nice digital readout of the temps. Thing uses
180W100W when running, less than bigger newer ones.
It’s even more ecological to keep it running since it still has the nasty ozone layer killing coolant that would partly evaporate when trashing it.EDIT: 100W just checked the type plate.
Luckily I’m pretty sure we are at least on an up trend when it comes to the ozone layer so even when eventually it kicks the can you don’t need to worry too much about that anymore. Now we just gotta fix carbon emissions.
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Time to make a billion dollars on something else, then start up a car company designed to fail. No investors, design a car for a 60-70k buying price, few bells and whistles, but built to last indefinitely with basic maintenance. Start the company planning to practically close it down just after the last preorder customer has their car delivered and become a maintenance company with a few employees to make replacement parts and install them. If demand rises, redesign for the new times, ramp up and do it all again.
“Why do you hate freedom? And America? And puppies? And apple pie?” -Republicans, probably
Who wants an infinite lifespan car anyway? Everything else would be getting safer and more fuel efficient. Might as well get around on horse and buggy.
Makes sense. That is why all those Japanese carmakers went bankrupt and diesal hasn’t been a thing since the 1950s.
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Planned obsolence should be illegal
Won’t anybody think of the poor shareholders? Planned obsolescence is what keeps this whole system running.
I’m a shareholder of $AMD because they worked with Framework to release a modular laptop GPU
Support companies that support right to repair
This is why I want an Onvo with battery swap over a Tesla… Everyone makes fun of me for it, but nobody realizes that if you swap the battery about once a year, then you’re able to preserve the life of your vehicle.
God that’s a pet peeve of mine, people who think they’re the sole component about why something works, when what’s working works IN SPITE of them.
Shareholders definitely qualify.
Spoiler: They won’t.
With so many fewer moving parts compared to an internal combustion engine, yes, EVs could be durable enough to be handed down from generation to generation. Just keep replacing the few moving parts that wear out. Worn interiors can be refreshed. Electronics are modules that can be replaced with updated versions.
What we have to look out for here though is this overall trend of ‘rent everything own nothing’, though. Car companies might try to make vehicles lease-only, so you have all the responsibilities of ownership but none of the benefits of ownership, and it’s never paid off, you just pay forever.
While it’s true that EVs can be built with fewer moving parts in the drive system itself, and that companies could absolutely produce longer lasting vehicles if they focused on longevity, there are still a lot of parts of a vehicle that simply will not last beyond a certain point. The moving parts of an EV still cover everything in the suspension, wheels/brakes/steering, and a number of other components that are very costly to replace, not to mention the underlying frame/unibody of the vehicle itself being vulnerable to wear over time depending on the conditions it’s driven in. “The few moving parts that wear out” still covers a huge swath of a vehicle, even if you take the engine and transmission out of the equation.
Well-built EVs with a focus on longevity and repairability could extend the lifespan of the average people mover by a great deal, but at the end of the day cars will by nature eventually reach a point where the cost to repair some major core component becomes too great to justify, outside of rare or collectable cases.
I know all that. I’m talking about the moving parts in the ENGINE, which then would not exist. A brushless DC drive motor only has bearings to worry about. A gearbox is necessary but a well-made gearbox should last for decades and is way easier to rebuild than an entire ICE engine. Of course suspension and brake parts wear out over time, but as you can see I wasn’t referring to those any more than I was referring to tires. All those things are cheaper and easier to replace, really, than having to worry about an entire ICE engine, with the fuel system, cooling system, and exhaust system to worry about. At worst an EV might have a motor or it’s inverter go bad, and of course the battery pack has a limited lifespan, but those are essentially drop-in replacements compared to what you have to go through with a modern ICE and all the crap attached to them.
Probably not a bad thing if your primary concern is the environment.
What about it’s batteries?
They are still chemical so they wouldn’t last forever.
Batteries can be replaced. An EV that could run 1 million miles would still need maintenance - I think the point is that they could be designed to last.
Planned obsolescence is so wide spread we don’t even notice it, but lots of products are designed to fail either through cheaper components or deliberately flawed design. That means we have to go and buy a replacement. It is also generally cheaper.
So we either have cheap products that will break or seemingly expensive products but they last for a very long time. But in the long run the cheap products generally cost you more to buy than one expensive product.
Batteries will be very expensive, however. The battery company is still quite greedy, eyeing for 5~10x growth in the near future - and that requires raising battery prices by at least twice.
Yes, the batteries would need to be replaced but that means designing them to be replaced.
Unlike the Tesla model Y which built the battery into the frame and filled it with foam so that it absolutely cannot get replaced. Musk said the way to replace the battery is to send the entire car to the scrap yard and recover the lithium from the shredder.
Another reason on my list why to never buy a Tesla.
That’s patently false, according to https://www.findmyelectric.com/blog/tesla-battery-replacement-cost-explained/#:~:text=Absolutely.,will likely also be similar.
My 2013 Model S has 235,000 miles on it and still l drives like it’s brand new. I haven’t yet had to replace the battery pack but when that day comes, it will almost certainly be worth the cost.
Here is the link where Sandy Munroe determined the Model Y pack is non repairable and it includes Elon Musk’s reply tweet saying the pack should be seen as “high grade ore”.
That says you cannot replace individual broken cells in a Tesla pack. That doesn’t say you can’t replace the pack
Aren’t all the cells worn in a ten year old battery?
After ~20-30 years, rubber gaskets and seals and cable insulation start failing. Plastic becomes brittle, especially if exposed to the sun. How do they solve this problem?
Modularity of construction, so that rubber components can be replaced without scrapping the whole vehicle. Reducing reliance on plastic parts, or improving the ease and quality of plastic recycling, so that we can fix the exterior components without sacrificing the chassis and core parts.
My guess is the thermodynamics of a hot engine makes the rubber and plastic parts fail more quickly than they would otherwise.
Not really. There’s no excessive heat outside of the engine bay, but plenty of rubber and plastic. Heck, even my rubber grip on my toothbrush has turned into a mush after some years and it wasn’t even exposed to sunlight, as there are no windows in the bathroom. Organic matter decays, it’s just life.
The engine compartment is what I was addressing. There’s a number of gaskets where failure can destroy an engine etc vastly reducing the life span of the car. Like while it does matter if the tail lights go out you can often reroute a cable for something like that with little difficulty. You cannot reroute the critical degrading components in a combustion engine as easily.
Electric cars are estimated to have 2/3 the maintenance costs of ICE vehicles. Their lifespan is likely only limited by the frame whereas ICE is limited by the frame and the engine. Major fail points of older cars include timing belts and head gaskets.
20-30 years for rubber…
You have way too much confidence. Have you owned a car for 10+ years? Almost everything rubber - especially within the suspension system needs replacement within the first 10 years of wear and tear.
I have a 12y old car and have no such issues.
I guarantee you’ve become use to the slop in nearly all of the components.
Especially if it’s made by Delco. Ask me how I know.
Friend of mine bought an EV. Didn’t even last a month. He landed in a tree.
Lemmy: Capitalism caused this.
In a socialist system cars would be tree proof.
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Yeah, got launched when drifting off the road
Sad to see an i5 in that condition :(
I’m sure if we spend enough time working on it, we can figure out how this is all OPEC’s fault. /s (jeeze tho I hope your friend was okay!)
He luckily only has 4 broken ribs.
I would love to see a car company create a vehicle platform with battery replacements central to the design of the car. Make larger packs out of smaller units so their larger models (or simply longer range models) simply use more of the smaller pack units. Recycle old packs back into making newer ones to reduce the need to mine more materials.
Sure, charge me enough on the replacement to keep this cycle going. Buying a car you know will get battery (and therefore range) upgrades as time goes on is a no-brainer.
Imagine the goodwill and free word-of-mouth advertising you would receive if you went the extra mile and open sourced all the software for the vehicle and allowed users to modify it if they wanted. Make the car not look like dogshit and I imagine you’d do well.
Surely the free market and competition will deliver what customers want, right? … Right?!?
This is basically like saying combustion vehicles could last nearly forever if you replaced the engine every now and then
I mean…they can, you just refresh the motor. Tons of ICE vehicles out there with 400-500k miles on them. Hell most semi trucks have millions of miles on them.
A rebuild every x00,000 miles on a Toyota sounds nicer than paying the price of a new pilot every 100,000 miles tbh. Computers don’t last though and emissions have made it a huge pain to fix on older cars. Nothing against emissions it’s a necessary evil.
New pilot? I dunno what any of this means
Honda pilot. I don’t know how to answer vague questions.😅
I am thinking of doing that when my civic should be legally declared dead. With the insanity that is new car prices and insurance for new cars plus the vanished used car market it just isn’t worth it. I want an EV but things have to go back to normal before that happens
It’s easy to do, and engines don’t cost much on ebay.
Fortunately Honda makes vehicles that are very durable, so it’s not like everything dies at the same age of the engine.
My family bought an electric forklift for their factory in the early 90s. I think it is a Yale.
My sister has since taken over the forklift for her company and she has only replaced the batteries and the controller once.
These things are cheap to replace and not as much of a mystery as ICE engines.
I am seeing people replace old Prius hybrid batteries themselves with basic tools now.
I think the only thing I would be concern about is the crash safety for cars. Newer cars are safer. I think that would be the only draw to buy a newer vehicle.
I replaced the main battery in a Gen1 Prius. Fiddly. Had to get a strong buddy to help lift it in and out of the car, but we did it in a long weekend. A full set of ‘used but tested’ cells cost something like $750 but that was probably 8 years ago.
Exactly. Plus the newer cells are more efficient and longer-lasting. You pretty much upgraded your vehicle.
Actually the low cost part of this was that they weren’t upgraded cells. Just tested-good cells from other battery packs. Most of the time it’s just a couple cells in the bigger battery that have issues, and they take those out of the pool and make a good amount of $$$ because we were required to send back all of our cells. Assuming that of the 26 (iirc) cells that 3 or 4 were bad that’s a big profit margin for sure. The car worked great after swapping them out.
That’s awesome. This is such a simple hack.
I was going to scoff at the Prius…the battery is only 1500$.
I need a Prius frame in an El Camino body.
I’m sure someone has a kit for that.
so do most electronics.
but you know, line must go up.
Good luck with that. Planned obsolescence is a key ingredient in capitalism. I mean what better way to make line go up than to turn a one-time purchase into a repeat purchase? This shareholders and executives will never be able to step on the working class if they can’t gouge customers. Won’t anyone think of the shareholders?
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“Unlike gas-powered engines—which are made up of thousands of parts that shift against one other—a typical EV has only a few dozen moving parts. That means lessdamage and maintenance, making it easier and cheaper to keep a car on the road well past the approximately 200,000-mile average lifespan of a gas-powered vehicle. And EVs are only getting better. “There are certain technologies that are coming down the pipeline that will get us toward that million-mile EV,” Scott Moura, a civil and environmental engineer at UC Berkeley, told me. That many miles would cover the average American driver for 74 years. The first EV you buy could be the last car you ever need to purchase.“
No way a car would last me and my family 74 years. First year I owned my car I put on almost 35k. Was driving 100 miles back and forth to work at that time. We typically take a road trip from colorado to near Vermont every year for a vacation.
A lot of midwesterns will drive 14 hours to get some where
At best case 60 miles an hour… Your commute was more than 90 mins? Ugh. That’s awful.
You weren’t clear if that was round trip or not, so possibly more than 180 mins? How did you find time to sleep!?
Round trip was 100 miles every day. This was rural Ohio driving to Columbus so it was not to bad 2 and 4 lane roads till you hit the city most of them time. If we got a lot of snowfall it could super suck but I was from NE Ohio so most of the time it was not that much white knuckle driving. You just listen to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts or call some friends on your hour or so drive home
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