[SN88]

I was talking to a dear friend and we discussed how older laptops used to last for 8- 10 years, older cellphones would last till it broke, TV'S would cross 6-7 years easy, older electrical appliances ac, refrigerators would just not die out compared to newer models which now last for maybe 4-5 years and start troubling so much that you go and buy a new one.

The same discussion then moved to cars and we realised that cars are following the same trend. Engines are made even better but a car doesn't run only on the engine right? Most of the newer cars say post 2010 - 2012 have fantastic engines that make us feel WHAT A CAR and then you realise post 5 years that the engine is perfect but the gear boxes start to go off, the suspensions instead of just a few parts need a complete overhaul, steering racks go bad , ECU malfunctions, megatronics going bust etc. These are extremely expensive to replace. Most of the buyers for used cars fall prey to this. They find a higher segment car going cheap and get excited then check the engine and find it perfect and go for a used car thinking the rest can be repaired / managed and then this reality hits that replacing a thing as a chip costs 30% of the buying cost!!

So is it something that is deliberately done or am I behaving like a conspiracy nut?
How can so many older cars run so easily, without glitches, stress free ? I dont believe the notion that newer cars have a lot of computers that is why they have issues, This doesnt make sense. I am sure they can make a proper computer then!!
Maybe the companies the automobile, electronic, electrical ones just would like people to subscribe but know that people wont , so twist it this way!! Make something enjoyable for 5 years and then the product goes bad due to one of the above reasons and the end customer sells it and moves to a new one?

I would like to apologise if this post seems ridiculous to some experts !!

[androdev]

Something in these lines...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

In economics and industrial design, planned obsolescence (also called built-in obsolescence or premature obsolescence) is a policy of planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life or a purposely frail design, so that it becomes obsolete after a certain pre-determined period of time upon which it decrementally functions or suddenly ceases to function, or might be perceived as unfashionable. The rationale behind this strategy is to generate long-term sales volume by reducing the time between repeat purchases (referred to as "shortening the replacement cycle"). It is the deliberate shortening of a lifespan of a product to force consumers to purchase functional replacements.

[Jeroen]

Originally Posted by SN88

So is it something that is deliberately done or am I behaving like a conspiracy nut?

Fifty years ago, cars were pretty crappy. Compare say a VW Beetle with a modern little Family saloon. The Beetle would be blown of the road with even the most moderate side wind, it was noisy, it was cold, it had atrocious fuel efficiency and it was not particularly comfortable. It was also not that reliable. It rusted badly.

When I grew up my dad was one of the first in our neighbourhood to actually own a car. He bought a DKW. When we would go on holiday to Germany, a 350km journey, my dad would get it serviced first. In those days nobody in their right mind would even attempt a 350 km journey without getting your car checked, oil flush the works. Right now I can jump into any of my cars parked outside and drive 3500km without even thinking about a service. I don’t check the oil or the tyre pressure. I just jump in and get going. My Audi easily does 20-25.000 km between services.

Check with break down services, such as AA and you will see that the reliability of cars over the last fifty years has increased tremendously. What is left, is a bit of bitching around the stuff that does occasionally fails.

Carburators are a pain. They are not as easy to service and adjust as we like to think and carburator engine can be notoriously difficult to start in cold and wet weather. Modern car will just about always fire up, completely and utterly reliable.

These so called electronic or computer problems on cars, are actually rarely related to the electronics or the computers. The internet just calls it electronic/computer problems. 90% of these are very simple things, a chaffed wire, a corroded battery terminal, a poor battery. People bith about what they don’t understand. Or give poor advise, to try their ignorance. The number of times members have advised other members to swap their ECUs because of some glitch is monumental.

But we only remember those “indestructible” cars from the past. Whereas statistically it is probably not true. In fact, in the western world the average age of cars has increased over the years, not decreased!

I remember my parents getting our first TV too. A huge box with a tiny screen, Black and White, very gritty screen. Only one channel. It broke down a lot, every few months, a guy with a suitcase full of valves would come and fix it. It was hugely expensive, very few people could afford a TV. We would switch it on and you could go a have a coffee before it would be warmed up.

I have owned my current TV for five years, gorgeous colour, massive screen I don’t even know how many channels it has, I have lost count. I can order just about any movie or series ever produced at the touch of a button. It even has an internet. And it cost less than my last lap top I bought!!

And here is the thing, the price of cars and TVs over the last fifty years has come down considerably. By and large, you are getting considerably better car and TVs at a fraction of the cost. Check with your parents how much they paid for their first car or TV and how it compares with what you are familiar with.

It is just a sign of a decadent society. We collectively forget how it really was 30-50 years ago. The few pleasant memories that we have become all encompassing. They become the norm against which we measure everything we are experiencing today. Then we whine about something we don’t understand, a car’ s ECU. That old car did not have an ECU, so it never suffered from problems related to ECU. But that old car had plenty of other things that did break down repeatedly and it was far less reliable, less safe, less comfortable and guzzled fuel and polluted like it was nobodies business. And it was hugely expensive in its time.

Count your blessing. I only do old cars and old electronics as a hobby and it keeps me very busy. I can honestly say that never in all these years of classic car ownership has there ever been a single day that everything on my cars worked perfectly. And I work on them almost daily, religiously.

We have three modern cars sitting in our drive way. Everything on these cars always works. And they only get the normal maintenance, nothing fancy.

Trust me, old stuff is not as good as many people like it to make out.

Jeroen

[SN88]

Hi Jeroen

I think you have missed my point.

I am not against newer technology by any means. The tvs and laptops that I talk about arent sourced from an article i have read on the "internet" as you called out. These were personally experienced and some of friends and families. We saw a building trend of equipment going off prematurely compared to older models. The main component wouldn't go bad but to repair the same the authorised service centres would just say it is not possible and quote some absurd figure later on.

The same thing started happening with cars. I do not say Carburetor engines were better as you misunderstand. Mpfi when they came out changed things for the better for sure.

But you have taken specific examples like the beetle. I have not taken any specific names but to counter your claim of the beetle giving so many issues, i could point out to the skoda rapids and the mahindra kuv, merc c180 etc etc for which there are a hundred examples of cars developing issues in the first few months of ownership.

I also disagree with your claim of tv and cellphones being cheaper now. Of course not!!
When was an IPhone more expensive than its newer model? Same with so many Android ones. When was a 55 inch tv more expensive than a newer model? You are comparing time periods too long. It is like saying when cellphones came out in 1990's and the price was x and offered so little was the price and then comparing to a phone now.
I am comparing time periods of maybe 10-15 years if you read my post correctly.

My entire point is NOT about older tech
being better than new. It is about newer tech deliberately not being utilized to its full capacity as manufacturers stand to gain from customers frequently changing cars.

[RadixLecti]

Originally Posted by SN88

How can so many older cars run so easily, without glitches, stress free ? I dont believe the notion that newer cars have a lot of computers that is why they have issues, This doesnt make sense. I am sure they can make a proper computer then!!

Is it possible that the older cars that we hold up as examples of solid build and reliability are simply the models from that era which were the best built and the most reliable? And the less reliable ones just ended up in scrapyards, so we forget that they ever existed.

To give an analogy from the realm of culture: I am now at an age where my friends and I talk about how great music from the 1990s was compared to what's on the charts today. But I recently went through the Billboard archives from the 90s and there was a lot of absolute garbage from one-hit-wonders that charted really well, got on to playlists in bars and clubs for a year or two, only to be forgotten forever.

[rdst_1]

What the OP is saying seems very true. And I agree, that he was talking about the recent past and not comparing products which are separated by more than a couple of decades.
In case of consumer electronics, planned failing is definitely a concept that is being practised. The part that irks me the most is that the companies will never talk about repairing the components and this carries over to the auto industry as well. I don't get irked just because of the money consumers are being charged, but also the affect such policies have on the environment due to unnecessary manufacturing needed where repairs could have been easily carried out.

For consumer electronics, my plans going forward are to look for commercial product instead. For example, instead of getting a Samsung/LG refrigerator, I will be buying one of the commercial offerings (the cold drink refrigerators you see in shops). Sure they will be a little industrial in looks, but one of my main criteria going forward is repairability and for that one needs easy access to all components.
My current LG refrigerator was bought in 1999 and it was still working fine until one day when some wire of it shorted and has resulted in defrost not working. The problem is the wiring is embedded in the insulation and the body of the refrigerator with no access and I am having to buy a new one just because of this small reason. I might still get it repaired eventually, but just transporting it to a place which can refill the insulation and transporting back will be too costly. I can get the chopping and fabrication done locally (which is required to reach the wires) and can probably do some crude repairs with other types of off-the-shelf insulation, but it won't be the same as the self expanding insulation usually filled in these appliances.

Similar things can be seen in cases of TV, WMs and other appliances as well. For example, I came to know recently that some companies (in case of FL) have now fused the bearing and the drum together and thus when the bearing fails, you have to pay for the whole drum instead of just having to replace a simple bearing and that changes the whole equation as it makes the repair 10 times more costly and thus making people buy a new machine instead of repairing their current one. In case of TVs, the companies again want to replace whole boards instead of carrying out repairs on the boards instead, which again, means that the costs become prohibitively expensive and most people prefer changing the product than repairing it.

[SN88]

To give an analogy from the realm of culture: I am now at an age where my friends and I talk about how great music from the 1990s was compared to what's on the charts today. But I recently went through the Billboard archives from the 90s and there was a lot of absolute garbage from one-hit-wonders that charted really well, got on to playlists in bars and clubs for a year or two, only to be forgotten forever.

Ok so to explain myself better i will try and give an example.
Say a company like vw group and their offerings namely vw themselves along with Skoda and audi. Their engines last a lifetime and are stunning to drive. They have tremendous satisfaction in owning them but the pleasure falls as their gear boxes fail.
You will find a lot of times owners selling them due to this as it isn't feasible to repair. So shouldn't the company do something about it so that the gearbox lasts to match the engine life atleast. The dsg have been in the market for over a decade, have they become reliable now? I dont think so. This defeats the point of argument that initial years are needed to rectify etc etc.

What is the point of having a brilliant car with everything working but having to sell it because fixing the gearbox isnt feasible due to cost and which is a manufacturing defect?
Who is the looser in this?

[--gKrish--]

I find newer cars, far more efficient and reliable than older ones. However, I do agree that in the case of electronics, there is un/planned obsolescence in some platforms/devices.

I have a Lenovo tablet with perfect hardware that I can no longer use for browsing. Some other famous brands have also been allegedly resorted to forcing customers to upgrade their devices or purposefully limiting the life of the devices.

[fhdowntheline]

Agree with Jeroen here. The number of options for consumer devices at various price points is mind boggling. Coupled with this is the improvement in the general financial condition , especially in India.
I got my first car in India, a Santro GLS , for 4.2lac in 2003. I can get an Spresso or Wagon R for the same price 18 years later . I can definitely say that cars of the yore were crappy in terms of reliability. I have experienced travelling in a malfunctioning Padmini from Mumbai to Pune , a distance of 170 km, in 14 hours . To add to our woes, it was 15th August that day, so sparse traffic and not many facilities open. The cars that we used later, like the 118NE were much better. I think overall reliability took a great leap after mpfi engines became common in the mid 90s . I have never faced a serious breakdown in any car of mine in the past 18 years since my Santro purchase.. I have used my fridge for 12 years with almost nil servicing. Some of my mobiles from 2014-15 still boot up well and are functional. Its just that I am not interested in using them anymore.

[SN88]

Originally Posted by rdst_1

In case of consumer electronics, planned failing is definitely a concept that is being practised. The part that irks me the most is that the companies will never talk about repairing the components and this carries over to the auto industry as well. I don't get irked just because of the money consumers are being charged, but also the affect such policies have on the environment due to unnecessary manufacturing needed where repairs could have been easily carried out.
.

I was in the middle east for around 6 years and this experience is from there. I owned a Ford explorer which got a PTU ( power transfer unit) failure. On inquiring more and reading up it was a known issue of the seals leaking resulting in the PTU box being damaged. Ford refused to just rectify the seals but forced to change the entire PTU which was hilariously expensive. I ultimately changed it drove the car for a year and sold it as i started hearing the start of the same noise again.


I then read a post right now which got me thinking for this post. It is from the same country 6 years later another customer of the Ford explorer complaining of the exact same issue. That car was purchased a year back.

What do you make of this?

[vik99]

Perhaps 'planned obsolescence' goes hand in hand in increasing affluence. As a kid I remember buying refills for Reynolds ball point pens. Over time it became natural to simply buy a new pen each time the ink ran out.

Manufacturers know that people give more importance to owning equipment with the latest features than something that lasts for a very long time, like say a Sony Trinitron TV, so they focus on building stuff with the latest bells and whistles. Stuff that is not necessarily the easiest to repair, because no one really cares about such things these days.

[rdst_1]

Originally Posted by fhdowntheline

Agree with Jeroen here. The number of options for consumer devices at various price points is mind boggling. Coupled with this is the improvement in the general financial condition , especially in India.
I got my first car in India, a Santro GLS , for 4.2lac in 2003. I can get an Alto for the same price 18 years later . I can definitely say that cars of the yore were crappy in terms of reliability. I have experienced travelling in a malfunctioning Padmini from Mumbai to Pune , a distance of 170 km, in 14 hours . To add to our woes, it was 15th August that day, so sparse traffic and not many facilities open. In stark contrast. the Santro was quite reliable, and frankly, I have never faced a serious breakdown in any car of mine in the past 18 years.

As the OP has mentioned above, you are going too far back. He is saying exactly the same thing you are. The Santro of 18yrs ago works perfectly and can possibly go on easily for another decade. I have a similar vintage Palio which I feel the same way about. He is pointing out that current gen hardware doesn't seem as well built as that was.

[V.Narayan]

In my six decades I have heard this lament every decade about how wonderful things were 10 or 15 or 20 years ago and how things are going to the dogs now. Now dear SN88 it seems its your turn. Things don't change, we do. I hear this lament on my class WA group and I keep reminding them it is we who have grown older (and more cynical and grouchy) and not the other way around.

On a lighter vein hey brother you are treading on the turf that belongs to Jeroen and me. We are the ones who are supposed to say, "ek hamara zamana tha..."{Oh the good old days...} but hey you're stealing our lines :-)

Be it cars or electronics or household appliances the stuff available today is more reliable and cheaper than what was sold 20 years ago; don't even talk of 40 years ago. With the passage of time things of our youth start to seem rose tinted. And you may be reading too much of internet. And given that the middle and upper classes in India are enjoying economic prosperity that we in this country never saw before fact is things, standard of living wise have not been better for most of the upper 40% of this country.

No, I don't want that nostalgic nightmare the Premier Padmini again (1990s) nor do I want the old Murphy radiogram that need a slap every now and then to sort out those hidden loose connections and I certainly don't want to be sent by my mother to stand in the queue to get the monthly ration of kerosene in the golden years of the 1970s.

How long you use a product is up to you. I have changed my laptop once every ten years on an average. I'm still only on my third, the first one came in 1996. My current mobile phone is my fifth. If blackberry's hadn't run out of technology I might have still been on my 4th! - the first came in 1997. A lot depends on how we approach our materialism. I write this wearing a sweater from 2002 and shoes from 1997. Damn I need to do more to help the economy.

[fhdowntheline]

@rdst_1 I dont think that is the case. For example, if you keep aside the software trickery to slow down mobile devices, the hardware itself is just fine. Like I said, I have mobiles from 2014-15 and even later ones which have had zero issues. My fathers Nokia 7plus , purchased almost 3 years ago, is updated to Android 10, December 2020 patch, and works as smooth and robustly as ever. No blurred screen, microphone/ speaker issues at all. None of the cars I purchased in the past 10 years gave any major issues, including the much maligned /dreaded DQ200 of the Polo TSI. This - in Pune’s equally dreaded traffic and road conditions.

[Jeroen]

Another interesting real life example:

We bought a new washing machine in 2013 for our home in the Netherlands. Even though we were living in Delhi at the time, we, especially my wife, would be in our home in the Netherlands about two months a year. So we bought a really nice one. Cost Euro 1400. Nothing special, just a good A brand one. Now for the next four years, that machine hardly got used as we lived abroad, apart from the few months a year my wife spend in the Netherlands. We used it, just my wife and me from mid 2016 till September 2020 when it broke down.

I traced it down to a problem with the electronic controls of the motor. Got a guy to come around, but he could not fix it. The motor and the controllerhad to be replaced at a cost of Euro 350.

A brand new one, real top of the line cost Euro 650, so we did away with the old one and got our selves a new one. It is much quieter, it uses less than 30% of the water and electricity compared to the old one and it has about 4 times as many different programs.

Even in the space of 5-10 years a lot of consumer stuff gets so much more better and cheaper. Repairing old stuff simply does not make sense. In my case, if a similar washing machine still would have cost Euro 1400 (plus 7 years inflation) spending Euro 350 on a new motor and controller might have been a very sensible solution.

We often don’t repair stuff, because these days it is often more economical to buy a brand new one, get the latest and the greatest.

Repairing stuff in the west is a hell of lot more expensive than in India too. Minimum hourly repair rates for house hold stuff (vacuum cleaners, washing machines, coffee makers) is at least Euro 50 - 60 an hour.

I don’t think stuff last less, it gets repaired less, because the difference between the repair price and a new one is reducing over time.

Also, just about all consumer stuff is changing so rapidly, it is very difficult to make a comparison. I paid about Euro 750 for my iPhone 6S about 5 years ago. I just bought an iPhone 12 Pro for about Euro 1100. But the capabilities are completely different. If I wanted to buy a phone now that is compatible with my old iPhone 6S I could get one for less than Euro 200.

I just don’t understand all this complaining about how stuff was better. I think it lacks per-perspective and honest apple to pear comparison.

Complaining about “stuff that was better before” is the realm of old sad folks. Unfortunately, I see a lot of young folks into it as well these days.

I thought I was an old grumpy git, but as this thread shows, it is all relative.

Jeroen