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Comment by georgefrowny | Hacker News Reader

> Guess eventually people will buy the cheapest car

It looks like lots of people choose to lease very expensive cars, and give them back after 3 years for a new one, dropping a obsolescence time-bomb onto the second-hand market and providing a strong signal to manufacturers that there is a substantial maintainability-insensitive market segment.

I am still surprised that no manufacturer has a balls-out "buy our cars, they will NEVER DIE, anyone can service them, and your kids will still be driving them" model, as they might have lower returns from not gouging over subscriptions, planned obsolescence and parts and software lock-in shenanigans, but they'd instantly capture a market segment.

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It’s largely a market signal, it seems. I was listening to a podcast with an ex-GM engineer and he said basically the business end is entirely driven by financing vehicles. Very little profit is derived from selling a car itself, nearly all the profit comes from the finance end of the business either on leases or car loans. Americans overall drive cars for a very short period of time before upgrading.

That, coupled with massive consumer preference for “zero maintenance” vehicles like supposedly not having to change transmission fluid for 100k miles. The manufacturers know that such a schedule will guarantee (more) damage, but it’s considered a marketing expense to handle early failures under warranty but sell the idea your car just needs an oil change every 10k miles and nothing else. After that first owner and warranty period the parts are simply considered a consumable.

If you plan on keeping your car for more than 3-5 years, toss the maintenance schedule handbook in the trash and figure out what an actual reasonable schedule is. It’s probably at minimum double the recommendations are.

Just curious how does one figure out the real maintenance schedule? I own a Tucson 2020 and plan to buy a Honda or Toyota in a couple of years.

Vibes? I jest a little bit.

For my car it’s been message boards with enthusiasts and mechanics who work on my vehicle. Luckily (or not…) mine is a somewhat niche performance car so people tend to nerd out over them.

A lot of it though is ignoring the vendor recommendations for outsourced parts like transmissions - go direct to manufacture and see what they say. This does seem to involve having an “insider” with manuals intended for service techs.

I also imagine fleet vehicle schedules might be informative as well.

Unfortunately I don’t have a very clean direct answer on it - it was a lot of feeling around and when in doubt erring on the side of over maintaining vs under.

Some is simply basic common sense though. We have not developed lubricants that can last over a decade and 120,000 miles in temperature ranges from below zero to hundreds of degrees.

I also advised some Chinese manufacturers to produce cheap, dummy home appliances and then sell to the Western market with a bit of mark-up, as more people are fed up with the smart ones. Not sure anyone is going to try though. Looks like everyone is in the data business.

China already competes in that market in the USA with Haier.

Electronics are cheaper than high quality electromechanical stuff, and allow you to give any product a veneer of sophistication and modernity that the modern consumer still perceives as being a sign of higher quality.

Our love of blinken-lights will be our downfall.

And you can make very shiny out-of-the-box finishes even in quite shitty materials that will decay quite quickly: soft plastics going gooey, white plastics yellowing, all plastics becoming brittle, poor anti-rust coatings, soft paintwork, etc, etc.

You should see motability

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