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I have a 3 year old Miele oven which needed one repair within the warranty period and another one just outside it. I am afraid Miele goes down the way of all th

• ovi256 7y ago
  >manufacturers must label expected lifetime ... I am opposed Everything is already value engineered, designed for a specified lifetime, that's how we get those low prices and low material use. Labeling would just make it explicit. I work in an oil pipeline design group and even these things have expected lifetimes (30 years). So even megaprojects like bridges, skyscrappers, aircraft carriers, everything designed has an expected lifetime.
  • fock 7y ago
    and I always thought, capitalism needs market transparency. Why not write it down and see what the customer does then, huh?
    • Consultant32452 7y ago
      Companies do write it down, in the form of warranties.
      • close04 7y ago
        Warranty and expected lifetime are different concepts. The first is just a service that offers free repair/replace within a period of time. The second is how long you can expect the product to be in use, with or without repairs, until it reaches the end of its life. This can be either due to catastrophic malfunction, no available servicing parts or skills, or obsolescence. Think of a car that may have 3 years warranty but a service life of maybe 10 or more years.
        • benj111 7y ago
          What should we as consumers expect the practical difference to be? If my kettle has a warranty and breaks down, it's on the manufacturer. If it's only within the design lifetime? What if 10% don't last the design lifetime, wheres the cut off if relevant? If I buy a kettle that lasts the design lifetime, but is deemed not to for the purposes of the law, do I get compensated? These are genuine questions, I am in favour of publishing this kind of information, it occurs to me that poorly thought out rules would be useless though.
          • fock 7y ago
            if it fails prematurely, you have bad luck, report it to some consumer advocacy group and buy a new one just as you did today. It's really funny to see the backlash on demanding such a basic premise of capitalism as information transparency in a forum like this.
            • benj111 7y ago
              If it's just about information transparency, how do you enforce honesty? What's to stop me saying that my kettle is designed to last 1000 years?
              • fock 7y ago
                if you lie, said consumer advocacy group will sue the company and the company's chapter will be revoked? seems quite easy.
                • benj111 7y ago
                  "company's chapter" Chapter? But my point is, what is lying? If a kettle is designed to last 10 years, it's reasonable to expect that 100% won't last that long, so what percentage should we reasonably allow to break in that time, 10%? 20%? 50%?. If the manufacturer was found to be lying, do I with my still working kettle get compensated? And your answer raises other concerns, who is this consumer advocacy group that's going to lead this? Is it reasonable to assume some proportion of people are going to direct their complaints there? This to me doesn't seem like an easy thing to police at all.
      • fock 7y ago
        ooh yeah. so the expected lifetime of my computer is ... 1 year. sorry that's ridicolous as assuming that a household appliance should live only 3 years? (I'm quite sure a lot of consumers are not prepared to buy everything anew every 3years, because it's so cheap)
        • Consultant32452 7y ago
          A warranty isn't the same as a life expectancy, but it is a signal to consumers about life expectancy. As a general rule, a product with a longer warranty will have a longer life expectancy.
          • adamlett 7y ago
            That's a very different and much weaker statement than the first one you made.
        • leni536 7y ago
          I always assume that such a short warranty period is for catching manufacturing defects and shipping damage and not amortization from normal use. Essentially a 1 year warranty is not much better than a 1 month or a 1 week warranty for a laptop.
      • adamlett 7y ago
        That doesn't hold up, when you think about it. Most companies don't offer any warranty outside of what is required by the law, which is usually between 0 and 2 years for consumer products, depending on where you live. By your argument that is how long we should expect most products to live.
        • dagw 7y ago
          Most companies don't offer any warranty outside of what is required by the law And parallel to that there are also companies adverting their 10,15 or 25 year warranty[1]. Now you can choose who you want to give your money to. That being said I have no problem per se with forcing companies to offer long warranties. [1] a further thing to look at is of course what these warranties actually cover and how likely you are to actually get help when your appliance breaks 17 years after you buy it. A 25 year warranty is useless (and should probably be illegal to advertise) if it's so full of loopholes and caveats that no one can practically make any claims against it.
          • adamlett 7y ago
            That's a different point than the one I was addressing, which was that warranties can be taken as indicators of how long products can be expected to last. What products that have extended warranties usually have in common is that they are expensive and represent significant investments for the average buyer. If you buy a car, a fridge, a washing machines, etc, you want a guarantee that you will be able to amortise that investment over as long a time as possible.
        • lotsofpulp 7y ago
          It absolutely holds up, I'm not sure why Consultant32452 is being downvoted. No one stops a manufacturer from offering a product with a 5 year warranty, and in fact they do. Shop for products made for businesses and you will find 5 year warranties. However, they cost much more, and consumers are choosing not to pay more for the products with 5 year warranties, and instead choosing to go with the 1 year warranty. Miele was known for making very durable products, however, even they over the years had to acknowledge that consumers were opting to purchase cheaper products from competitors, so they had to do the same to stay in business.
• nwellnhof 7y ago
  Can confirm, Miele's consumer products aren't what they used to be. Your only option these days is to get a commercial product.
  • mytailorisrich 7y ago
    Well, that somewhat illustrates my point. Companies have to sell and they have to survive. Thus they have to build products that people will buy and make a profit out of it.
    • chopin 7y ago
      Miele explicitly markets to customers who expect lasting appliances.
      • isostatic 7y ago
        And then think "if we cut this corner we'll make $1 more on each unit, that's an extra $3M a year, that's my bonus sorted" Those cuts take time to filter down into public consciousness, because companies are incapable of measuring the value of quality
  • lnsru 7y ago
    Or buy older refurbished Miele’s product if one can live with outdated design.
• benj111 7y ago
  To be fair the Miele the warranty repair is them standing by their product, which should be applauded, ideally we'd have 10+ year warranties to encourage good design. Faults do tend to have a bathtub curve to them, so I'm not sure its reasonable to expect 100% reliability. Did you contact Miele about your just out of warranty breakage? Their reaction to that would be interesting.
  • chopin 7y ago
    Yes I did. I got a reduction on the repair costs (which where initially at a point warranting buying a new appliance instead of a repair; spare parts alone where several hundred Euros). But for Miele prices I don't want to be at their mercy. I want a lasting product. When waiting for the repair I looked around. Many competitors have similar offerings (functionality) with a 5 year warranty at 2/3 of the price point (or even less).
    • benj111 7y ago
      "I got a reduction on the repair costs" That's good? As far as it goes, it's a good smell at least. I'm not of a view that a warranty guarantees no faults. To my mind it is the manufacturer saying they will stand by their product for the warranty period, that they expect no faults, and putting their money on the line to prove it. So I'm not particularly in favour of castigating companies for any unreliability, if they handle it correctly. Having said all this, I did just check what Miele's warranty is, I was expecting 5+ years, but it's only 2 years, so your point about competitors is a good one. I suppose it highlights a good point about what we as consumers should do. Should we go with Miele that everyone knows is good quality, but only offers a 2 year warranty. Or should we go with the competitor with the 5 year warranty? I suspect most of us would take the first option, when we should really be taking the 2nd.
      • chopin 7y ago
        As I said: I don't want to be at their mercy even if they handled my case well. What especially bothered me is the fact that among the parts changed was an item (the controller) which had 250€ on the price list. It apparently had not been sealed water tight although construction wise it could be exposed to hot vapour. For that price point I expect everything being IP67, parts and connectors. It's not exactly hard, I've done this myself. The parts are only protected by a cooling fan designed to keep also the moisture away. For some reason, the fan did not work at one cycle. There is no detection in place to detect this, leading to a bricked oven. In my book this is engineering fail on many levels. Edited to add: Miele offers a 10 year warranty extension, at roughly 20% of the original price. It is left as an exercise for the reader what such a premium means for the expected failure rate...