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Comment by TheLoafOfBread | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how the plethora of no name brands will hold on long term. Car is not a phone. You can't just make 100k units and forget that product even existed after End of Production. People will want maintenance, diagnostic, software support. People will want parts after few years.

Even big boys like Hyundai have problems with parts as we saw here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38783355

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It will be rough in the beginning but when China starts exporting in volume it will get solved for sure. Building great cars is the hard part. Companies that can do that can also figure out the easy stuff like brand names, maintenance, etc.

Universal parts is one solution. If 80% of the parts work in 80% of the cars, you solved a huge portion of the problem.

Capitalism only encourages economies of scale to a low level. Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel and even at minority market saturation switch to in-house vertical CPU. Mobile of course made a huge impact but wasn't a market leader globally.

And once being tied to a vendor there's no real incentive for right to repair etc.

"minority market saturation"

let's stop repeating this nonsense. You wouldn't say LVMH has minority market saturation in the clothing industry, because it doesn't compete in the global clothing industry. It competes in the global luxury goods market, where it has a dominant market majority control. Similarly, Apple has, and for a long time has had, a near monopoly on the luxury electronics market.

I was responding to 80% of parts in 80% of cars and in that context is certainly a minority.

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