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IDK about "at cost" but shouldn't _some_ price regulation of spare parts be included? With no limits, any manufacturer might say "The price for any spare part i
by abeppu 1y ago
IDK about "at cost" but shouldn't _some_ price regulation of spare parts be included?
With no limits, any manufacturer might say "The price for any spare part is the cost of the original item + a significant additional fee, because our process will be to pull a complete new unit from the warehouse, and have someone disassemble it and send you the one part."
- MichaelZuo 1y agoManufacturers can already legitimately say the additional price for 1 spare part for a $5 part is actually $250,000 dollars because the last mould has worn out…? Typically nobody would actually go through with placing any orders beyond that point, unless they’re the pentagon.
- amanaplanacanal 1y agoThey might want to talk to their legal departments before claiming such a thing if it isn't actually true. Lawsuits involve discovery.
- MichaelZuo 1y agoHow does this relate to my comment or any other comment in the chain? I don’t think anyone suggested manufacturers could get away with lying all the time.
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- bluGill 1y ago250k for a single mold if they don't have drawings of the final size of the last is reasonable - high but reasonable. Building molds is still a lot of trial and error that CAD cannot help with. Plus time for one off on an assemble line is not cheap since it is often half an hour of nobody in the factory working except the two people switching out the mold. once you have a mold you can make thousands and so the cost ammortizes out if you need that many. my company has looked into spending billions for a chip fad of obsolete processes just to get some no longer in prodction parts. So far not worth it.
- dcow 1y agoTough luck then. The point of the law is to make it easier for people to repair the things they rightfully own. Not kill business by requiring all companies to indefinitely manufacture parts for anything they’ve ever sold.
- MichaelZuo 1y agoSo then what does it change? Businesses previously and will continue to negate it in practice, sometimes for legitimate reasons and sometimes not. And most of the time nobody outside of a small group will know for sure.
- dcow 1y agoIt makes actively preventing repairs (including via software restriction, which happens today) illegal. It clarifies that it is the responsibility of the company providing the product to in good faith facilitate 3rd party repair of the product by providing parts and documentation fairly. This is sadly not the norm for electronics goods hence the whole movement in the first place.
- vel0city 1y agoI remember looking at prices for OEM parts for my motorcycle and marveling at how I could effectively build my own, but parts alone before shipping would cost me like $80k for a bike that was <$25k new for the several year newer model at the time. The cost for the part at the factory for 1,000+ units is radically different than the part for your one off garage build.
- bluGill 1y agoThe cost of a single part is a lot higher than the cost of a pallot of them to a factory on some day 6 months from now.
- beau_g 1y agoThere's a lot of logistics cost for replacement parts, shipping, storage, a system to track them, etc. in distribution warehouses all over the world in small numbers. It's all work done manually by humans at every level. Studies to project failure rates, failure modes, demand planning, etc. may be baked into this cost as well depending on how the company accounts for it. Many years ago I was servicing Maserati GranTurismos and Quattroportes of which some use a ZF 6 speed auto transmission. Since the same transmission is used in Land Rovers, I would buy parts from the Land Rover dealer which was nearby. One time I went there and they didn't have any fluid for the transmission for Land Rovers, but they did for Jaguar. The fluid was identical, but on a different shelf, and cost a lot more. The parts department said that Jaguar uses a 3rd party parts distribution contract in North America, but Land Rover does it in house, so every Jaguar part, of which many are identical to Land Rovers, costs more. They could not just bill out a Land Rover part internally to their own dealer to service a Jaguar either (they were a franchise that repaired both).