> Then of course there's the problem of how to incentivize companies to not lie about that number ... In New Zealand we don't have the published information, b

> Then of course there's the problem of how to incentivize companies to not lie about that number ... In New Zealand we don't have the published information, but consumer law has been applied such that if things don't last a "reasonable" length of time (e.g. 5 years for a TV) the retailer has a responsibility to repair or replace[1]. In the same vein I imagine that, if manufacturers were forced to replace anything that didn't meet the claimed lifespan at the time of sale then manufacturers would quickly become very good at providing numbers that aligned with real-world failure rates and lifespans. [1] "We don't have those any more" is not an excuse - if you sell a TV that breaks after a year and can't repair it, you'll be replacing it with the closest current equivalent model.