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I totally support this. I accidentally cracked the touch screen of my car radio console. The car is nothing special, a Ford Mondeo that is a few years old. Cos

I totally support this. I accidentally cracked the touch screen of my car radio console. The car is nothing special, a Ford Mondeo that is a few years old. Cost to replace touch screen module: more than the entire value of the car! That is insane. Effectively, if I want to claim from insurance - crack the touch screen (it is a replaceable module) and have to scrap the entire car. In this case, I managed to get a replacement (fitted) from a scrapped car for 1/10 of the price the Ford dealer was quoting me.

runeks 9y ago
How does regulation solve the issue that replacing e.g. the touch screen may take many man hours of labor, whereas making the car itself took proportionally less, thus making replacements more expensive? Your experience is a symptom of a high degree of automation in one area (car manufacturing) and the absence in another (repairs), and regulation does not change that.
- wheels 9y ago
  Much of that can be mitigated in product design. The amount of labor needed to replace something is a function of the extent to which being serviceable is a design goal.
  - PeterisP 9y ago
    It feels like an unachievable goal if I think about it even if the devices are designed to be very servicable. Let's use the same example of a hypothetical simple toaster -like device, and assume that you have a specific breakage where fixing it takes 20% of the effort required to make the device in the first place. I'd say it's feasible that massproduction and automation brings up the efficiency so that this already means that producing the item takes less human hours than fixing the item even if it's easily openable and servicable. Furthermore, even if you have a scenario where fixing an item takes 20% of the hours to build the item, it's feasible that the local repairperson in a first wold country costs more than 5 times per hour than the cheapest possible place in the world where the item was manufactured. It is quite realistic that the efficiencies of the global mass production toolchain mean that repairing many types of items doesn't make practical sense no matter how serviceable they are. A person manually soldering a single capacitor can reasonably cost more than the manufacturing of the entire circuit board and its components - and that's not caused by faulty design, but by the effect of scale and automation; it's not that repair is expensive but that replacements are dirt cheap.
- SeanDav 9y ago
  From the source article: > robust, easily repairable and good quality products: "minimum resistance criteria" to be established for each product category from the design stage My console was not "easily repairable".
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dTal 9y ago
  This is the fundamental issue, yes. Some thoughts: A large part of the discrepancy is not automation, but cheap labour in the East where many of our products are made. Regulation can help redress than inequality. Repair is so expensive because it's made to be. It shouldn't take several hours of skilled labour to replace an easily broken component like a touchscreen - it should be snap-in. Regulation can address that by mandating reparability. It's also worth thinking about why we consider replacement being cheaper than repair to be a problem at all - if you trust the market, what's so horrible about that? Real time saver right? Answer: the price of new goods does not reflect their full environmental and social cost. The switch in your toaster breaks - you buy a new one for a fiver instead of repairing the switch. The old one goes in a landfill. A quantity of non-renewable resources like oil and metal are used up; a the increased demand for these things contributes to the deaths of miners, and people who live near the factories and refineries. Fuel is burned to deliver the new toaster to you, and the Earth's temperature goes up a teeny-tiny fraction. None of these things are included in the price. Regulation can help that too.
  - cwyers 9y ago
    > Repair is so expensive because it's made to be. It shouldn't take several hours of skilled labour to replace an easily broken component like a touchscreen - it should be snap-in. Regulation can address that by mandating reparability. Which can increase the original cost of the good.
    - inetknght 9y ago
      When the original cost of the good is so expensive as to significantly prohibit replacement of broken/defective parts, is the good really all that... good?
      - cwyers 9y ago
        Watch this video of a crash test between a 1959 Chevy and a 2009 Chevy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g The '59 Chevy gets 13.5 miles per gallon. [1] The '09 Chevy gets 25. [2] Yes, modern cars are more difficult to maintain than older cars -- they require more specialized equipment to maintain, parts are more difficult to replace, so on and so forth. Modern cars are also incredibly more fuel efficient and safer to ride in, and much of that is enabled by the same engineering efforts that make cars more difficult to maintain. 1) http://www.automobile-catalog.com/make/chevrolet_usa/full-size_chevrolet_5gen/full-size_bel_air_3gen_4-door_sedan/1959.html http://www.automobile-catalog.com/make/chevrolet_usa/full-si... 2) https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/noframes/25483.shtml https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/noframes/25483.shtml
- nejdjdjrjrj55 9y ago
  It seems you've reduced the process of making a car to welding finished parts together on the line. Seems intellectually dishonest to suggest that a robot screwing finished parts together is the only context relevant for considering cost comparison Products that last longer reduce our need to produce more. Reduces human labor requirements, resource extraction They crater sales though. And economists can't sit about contributing little while dictating how objects are produced IMO that's a net win for humanity. Economists religion be damned. Play Sim City if you want to get your authoritarian jollies off
- colanderman 9y ago
  What? Car radios are (or at least, were 10 years ago) easy for even a DIYer to replace with about an hour's labor. Even in modern cars with nonstandard radios they're still modular. You can take it out and replace it with a functioning one. The GP's issue isn't that he needed a technician to take apart the radio and install a new screen, he just needed a new radio. Which was his eventual solution.
  - ptaipale 9y ago
    Add to automation in car manufacturing the logistics. The chain of supply of cars is efficient due to high volumes, predictability and competition. The chain of supply for spare parts (like radio modules) is low volume, unpredictable and does not attract competition. Thus, fixing a car radio may seem prohibitively expensive when compared to the price of the car. If you do it yourself, it's cheaper, but the insurance company won't pay for it.
    - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
      > Thus, fixing a car radio may seem prohibitively expensive when compared to the price of the car. It's very easy to add together a few repairs which sum to more than the value of the car. If you wanted to get a new car from scratch by ordering the individual components and having your dealership put them together, it would have to be at least 10x more expensive than buying one produced at scale. > If you do it yourself, it's cheaper, but the insurance company won't pay for it. On the one hand, you have the value of your time in your skill area, versus mucking about with a radio. On the other, you have the overhead and inefficiency of a huge dealer/insurance system. Somewhere in the middle is your local mechanic :) Find a good one and make friends - you don't have to go to the dealership!
      - mark-r 9y ago
        I have a relative who once worked in a city vehicle maintenance facility. They had a truck with a body that had rusted out, and he was told to replace the entire body. He pointed out that a new truck would be cheaper than replacing those parts. He was told to do it anyway - they had a repair budget already, but getting a new truck would require making a case before the city council. He quit that job.
scottLobster 9y ago
My family encountered a similar issue with something even simpler, console LEDs. Some of the LEDs that lit up the control console in our old Toyota Sienna blew out, so we asked a dealer how much it would be to fix. Turns out they'd have to take off the entire dashboard just to access the LEDs, several hours of labor and several hundred dollars. We could literally get a new set of tires for cheaper. As it was we committed the control locations to muscle memory and just had dark controls at night until it died several years later. The fact that replacing a simple LED is so horrendously complicated is laughable.
- mark-r 9y ago
  My 2007 Sienna has the same problem, a blown LED. Luckily it lights a part of the dash I don't need often. I don't understand how LEDs can blow out, they're solid state and should last nearly forever.
  - scottLobster 9y ago
    Probably less the LEDs themselves and more the circuits powering them. Too much current can blow out an LED the same way it can blow out an incandescent. Solid state doesn't protect the diodes from heat damage.
RealityVoid 9y ago
This is not really the best example since automotive usually has a higher degree of quality and more thought goes into durability compared to house appliances and automotive producers are obligated to provide spare parts for the lifetime of a car model, @10 or 15 years if I'm not mistaken. House appliances do not have this protection.
Fej 9y ago
I did a quick search for your touch screen problem. It seems you might have been able to, instead of replacing the whole unit, replace the digitizer only, if possible. The whole assembly (including screen) appears to be $200-300 before labor. How much did you end up paying?
- SeanDav 9y ago
  The first thing I investigated was trying to repair just the screen, but no local company was willing to do that. I ended up paying about $500 including labour, using console from scrapped car.

runeks 9y ago

How does regulation solve the issue that replacing e.g. the touch screen may take many man hours of labor, whereas making the car itself took proportionally less, thus making replacements more expensive? Your experience is a symptom of a high degree of automation in one area (car manufacturing) and the absence in another (repairs), and regulation does not change that.

wheels 9y ago
Much of that can be mitigated in product design. The amount of labor needed to replace something is a function of the extent to which being serviceable is a design goal.
- PeterisP 9y ago
  It feels like an unachievable goal if I think about it even if the devices are designed to be very servicable. Let's use the same example of a hypothetical simple toaster -like device, and assume that you have a specific breakage where fixing it takes 20% of the effort required to make the device in the first place. I'd say it's feasible that massproduction and automation brings up the efficiency so that this already means that producing the item takes less human hours than fixing the item even if it's easily openable and servicable. Furthermore, even if you have a scenario where fixing an item takes 20% of the hours to build the item, it's feasible that the local repairperson in a first wold country costs more than 5 times per hour than the cheapest possible place in the world where the item was manufactured. It is quite realistic that the efficiencies of the global mass production toolchain mean that repairing many types of items doesn't make practical sense no matter how serviceable they are. A person manually soldering a single capacitor can reasonably cost more than the manufacturing of the entire circuit board and its components - and that's not caused by faulty design, but by the effect of scale and automation; it's not that repair is expensive but that replacements are dirt cheap.
SeanDav 9y ago
From the source article: > robust, easily repairable and good quality products: "minimum resistance criteria" to be established for each product category from the design stage My console was not "easily repairable".
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dTal 9y ago
This is the fundamental issue, yes. Some thoughts: A large part of the discrepancy is not automation, but cheap labour in the East where many of our products are made. Regulation can help redress than inequality. Repair is so expensive because it's made to be. It shouldn't take several hours of skilled labour to replace an easily broken component like a touchscreen - it should be snap-in. Regulation can address that by mandating reparability. It's also worth thinking about why we consider replacement being cheaper than repair to be a problem at all - if you trust the market, what's so horrible about that? Real time saver right? Answer: the price of new goods does not reflect their full environmental and social cost. The switch in your toaster breaks - you buy a new one for a fiver instead of repairing the switch. The old one goes in a landfill. A quantity of non-renewable resources like oil and metal are used up; a the increased demand for these things contributes to the deaths of miners, and people who live near the factories and refineries. Fuel is burned to deliver the new toaster to you, and the Earth's temperature goes up a teeny-tiny fraction. None of these things are included in the price. Regulation can help that too.
- cwyers 9y ago
  > Repair is so expensive because it's made to be. It shouldn't take several hours of skilled labour to replace an easily broken component like a touchscreen - it should be snap-in. Regulation can address that by mandating reparability. Which can increase the original cost of the good.
  - inetknght 9y ago
    When the original cost of the good is so expensive as to significantly prohibit replacement of broken/defective parts, is the good really all that... good?
    - cwyers 9y ago
      Watch this video of a crash test between a 1959 Chevy and a 2009 Chevy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g The '59 Chevy gets 13.5 miles per gallon. [1] The '09 Chevy gets 25. [2] Yes, modern cars are more difficult to maintain than older cars -- they require more specialized equipment to maintain, parts are more difficult to replace, so on and so forth. Modern cars are also incredibly more fuel efficient and safer to ride in, and much of that is enabled by the same engineering efforts that make cars more difficult to maintain. 1) http://www.automobile-catalog.com/make/chevrolet_usa/full-size_chevrolet_5gen/full-size_bel_air_3gen_4-door_sedan/1959.html http://www.automobile-catalog.com/make/chevrolet_usa/full-si... 2) https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/noframes/25483.shtml https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/noframes/25483.shtml
nejdjdjrjrj55 9y ago
It seems you've reduced the process of making a car to welding finished parts together on the line. Seems intellectually dishonest to suggest that a robot screwing finished parts together is the only context relevant for considering cost comparison Products that last longer reduce our need to produce more. Reduces human labor requirements, resource extraction They crater sales though. And economists can't sit about contributing little while dictating how objects are produced IMO that's a net win for humanity. Economists religion be damned. Play Sim City if you want to get your authoritarian jollies off
colanderman 9y ago
What? Car radios are (or at least, were 10 years ago) easy for even a DIYer to replace with about an hour's labor. Even in modern cars with nonstandard radios they're still modular. You can take it out and replace it with a functioning one. The GP's issue isn't that he needed a technician to take apart the radio and install a new screen, he just needed a new radio. Which was his eventual solution.
- ptaipale 9y ago
  Add to automation in car manufacturing the logistics. The chain of supply of cars is efficient due to high volumes, predictability and competition. The chain of supply for spare parts (like radio modules) is low volume, unpredictable and does not attract competition. Thus, fixing a car radio may seem prohibitively expensive when compared to the price of the car. If you do it yourself, it's cheaper, but the insurance company won't pay for it.
  - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
    > Thus, fixing a car radio may seem prohibitively expensive when compared to the price of the car. It's very easy to add together a few repairs which sum to more than the value of the car. If you wanted to get a new car from scratch by ordering the individual components and having your dealership put them together, it would have to be at least 10x more expensive than buying one produced at scale. > If you do it yourself, it's cheaper, but the insurance company won't pay for it. On the one hand, you have the value of your time in your skill area, versus mucking about with a radio. On the other, you have the overhead and inefficiency of a huge dealer/insurance system. Somewhere in the middle is your local mechanic :) Find a good one and make friends - you don't have to go to the dealership!
    - mark-r 9y ago
      I have a relative who once worked in a city vehicle maintenance facility. They had a truck with a body that had rusted out, and he was told to replace the entire body. He pointed out that a new truck would be cheaper than replacing those parts. He was told to do it anyway - they had a repair budget already, but getting a new truck would require making a case before the city council. He quit that job.

scottLobster 9y ago

My family encountered a similar issue with something even simpler, console LEDs. Some of the LEDs that lit up the control console in our old Toyota Sienna blew out, so we asked a dealer how much it would be to fix. Turns out they'd have to take off the entire dashboard just to access the LEDs, several hours of labor and several hundred dollars. We could literally get a new set of tires for cheaper. As it was we committed the control locations to muscle memory and just had dark controls at night until it died several years later. The fact that replacing a simple LED is so horrendously complicated is laughable.

mark-r 9y ago
My 2007 Sienna has the same problem, a blown LED. Luckily it lights a part of the dash I don't need often. I don't understand how LEDs can blow out, they're solid state and should last nearly forever.
- scottLobster 9y ago
  Probably less the LEDs themselves and more the circuits powering them. Too much current can blow out an LED the same way it can blow out an incandescent. Solid state doesn't protect the diodes from heat damage.

RealityVoid 9y ago

This is not really the best example since automotive usually has a higher degree of quality and more thought goes into durability compared to house appliances and automotive producers are obligated to provide spare parts for the lifetime of a car model, @10 or 15 years if I'm not mistaken. House appliances do not have this protection.

Fej 9y ago

I did a quick search for your touch screen problem. It seems you might have been able to, instead of replacing the whole unit, replace the digitizer only, if possible. The whole assembly (including screen) appears to be $200-300 before labor. How much did you end up paying?

SeanDav 9y ago
The first thing I investigated was trying to repair just the screen, but no local company was willing to do that. I ended up paying about $500 including labour, using console from scrapped car.