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barelyauser | 1 year ago

Once I was told by a mechanic the following: if car companies where the ones liable for fixing your car, the design would look very much different.

Car companies choose what is simple to manufacture, but eventually making it very hard to maintain. If it where not for regulation, they would give you something that has a timer for breaking. That is how little they respect their customers.

Anecdotal (but at this point one of hundreds I've come across): older car had fuel pump accessible through a little sealed hatch. In current car the same pump was integrated into the fuel tank. It went bad. Guess what? You have to remove the whole fuel tank to service it. And that entails taking the exhaust out of the way. Car companies hate you.

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mapt|1 year ago

Do we see extreme differences in design in monopsony fleet buys, like military vehicles or the postal service?

zeotroph|1 year ago

> if car companies where the ones liable for fixing your car

Sidenote: this one of the ideas behind Ida Aukens (controversial, and I would say misunderstood) "You will own nothing and be happy": One way to make companies liable is by making them own and maintain what they produce for the entire product cycle, and you only rent these items.

Of course this needs a very healthy and competitive market with effective regulations to prevent eternal enshittification. And maybe it doesn't work when shareholder value is everything that counts.

bityard|1 year ago

Fortunately fuel pumps don't fail very often these days and dropping the tank is not a hard job for a mechanic. But I'll admit it's not very fun for a DIYer.

The most idiotic thing I've had to deal with so far was headlight replacement on a Subaru Outback. On the driver's side, you can't get to the headlight from the top. You have to take out the whole front wheel well liner, remove some other things, and then you can GET to the headlight, but it's way back there and you can't even SEE it. So you have to do the job blind and one-handed. I did it ONCE and hated every second of it.