Right To Repair Gaining Steam

Archer20 · October 12, 2021

Unpopular opinion, but electric cars are made to be disposable. Right to repair or not, the current design doesn't permit feasible, and cost effective replacements. I cannot see a future "more service friendly" design being feasible either.

An internal combustion vehicle will for a long time, be easier, cheaper and more practical to keep on the road. Even many many years past it's serviceable life.

I can get a carb rebuild kit for 30 dollars for my 1955 Chevy. Even my modern Silverado, everything is very serviceable, and parts are relatively cheap.

EDIT: Even for modern internal combustion cars, the tech can be problematic sometimes, and companies withold valuable shop manuals and electrical schematics moreso than ever. Some even try to keep some functions and programming locked behind proprietary scan tools. This is... thankfully defeated in most cases by the aftermarket.

Now, cars aside, I am a staunch opponent of manufacturers soldering RAM to the mainboard of laptops, as well as SSDs. This makes the units much hard to service, and upgrade. Dell even does this with their Latitudes now, which are business oriented!

leadeater · October 12, 2021

3 hours ago, Archer20 said:

Unpopular opinion, but electric cars are made to be disposable. Right to repair or not, the current design doesn't permit feasible, and cost effective replacements. I cannot see a future "more service friendly" design being feasible either.

Yep and I see one key factor around this for why it is the case and how it will change, regulation requiring serviceable design. This however isn't going to happen because of the fear it will stifle the EV uptake and I honestly do not think the technology is there to create more generic battery systems without significant drawbacks.

Right now EV's are getting special treatment, that has to end at some point. Motors should be fairly easily replaced, batteries, charging systems etc. All of these can be designed like that, there's no excuse when all of this type of thing already exists. I can accept for now more proprietary designs are required to eek out the maximum potential to make EVs more attractive however as were are now seeing EVs approach 600 mile range my appetite very quickly changes.

wanderingfool2 · October 12, 2021

3 hours ago, Archer20 said:

Now, cars aside, I am a staunch opponent of manufacturers soldering RAM to the mainboard of laptops, as well as SSDs. This makes the units much hard to service, and upgrade. Dell even does this with their Latitudes now, which are business oriented!

See this is actually what I am a bit afraid of with right to repair....that legislation will come in place where they need to offer the software and hardware for repairs...but then they will pull an Apple type of move and integrate everything into one chip for "security" or for "speed" and then effectively lock in consumers because yea you could replace the storage, but you need to pay an arm and a leg for it because you are also replacing your CPU/GPU.

I am all for right to repair, and I think the thing that Samsung did with disabling the camera and what Apple is doing with the touch screen needs to be addressed, but I really do fear that it's going to be some legislation that makes it so that Apple/Samsung/other manufacturers can get away with it by making their products even worse to repair.

3 hours ago, Archer20 said:

Unpopular opinion, but electric cars are made to be disposable. Right to repair or not, the current design doesn't permit feasible, and cost effective replacements. I cannot see a future "more service friendly" design being feasible either.

Some of them yes. An example being the leaf, which doesn't use any active cooling (and their batteries as a result don't last as long). There was a good article by a company that used Teslas in their fleet (think 500k+ miles), and they concluded that based on similarly priced luxury vehicles (ICE) the overall life span cost them less with Telsa than the luxury ICE. (Tire costs were way higher for the Tesla, but general maintenance costs lower, especially when hitting 100k+ miles)

@Forbidden Wafer I know the comment was from a while back, but 16k for a battery replacement isn't bad (when you consider the initial quote wasn't just for a battery), considering it was a lease vehicle and he hadn't insured it properly under the lease (they also mentioned Tesla shop wasn't able to service batteries...I'm assuming because opening the battery pack requires special certifications which not all mechanics have). The guy literally had options to take it to the other 3rd party repair centers and he did. Guess what though, the independent repair shop they charged him $700 to replace the coolant plug. The only part that right to repair has in this is whether or not Tesla offers that part (which they have been opening up more and more components to buy...but I think an issue is is that they have literally sold vehicles months in the future and aren't exactly swimming in available parts). They are also constantly undergoing redesigns, which makes parts harder, but in a case like this one it can't happen on newer vehicles because they fixed the vulnerability.

I think right to repair is important, but I don't think we should really be focusing on Tesla really, because there are so many tech companies that are much worse in the repair-ability (like Apple, or Samsung). Right to repair is about making it so that people can repair their devices, but about competency/costs about being able to do first party repairs...but rather about 3rd party repairs.