Repairing complicated stuff is hard, it takes highly skilled humans, and products evolve so fast it is really hard to gain expertise on repairing things.
Then maybe we shouldn't be making things quite so complicated? Especially when that complexity mostly exists for bulk data collection for behavioral modification?
Very little of the complexity in a modern car is related to actually getting around - and when we do pull back the layers of complexity (see the Toyota unintended acceleration case for some source code analysis), we learn that the complexity is horrid, in implementation and function. And then modern cars have hundreds of millions of lines of code entirely unrelated to the car actually operating, and some of the more famous EV manufacturers just ignore the reasons for automotive grade stuff and have their display consoles overheating and shutting down, or burning out their flash with needless writes...
Of course, this wouldn't matter as much if the companies involved didn't go
out of their way to make their stuff impossible for anyone else to repair. Third party Tesla shops don't exist, because Tesla won't release the software and such required to work on their cars, because... profit, mostly. Better to scrap the cars and replace them than to have to admit that, no, they really do fall apart in 10 years, or to have to keep large stocks of parts for all 70,000 variants of the piece they've fiddled with during the production runs.
Complex products can be built by robots.
Great, but when you use a robot to build something that could have been far easier to repair, but isn't, I'm not sure what you're doing except planned obsolescence, which, as we all know, is the greatest thing ever, leading to constant excuses to "have to" replace a perfectly functional thing with a broken display screen, or something. I mean, you
get to buy a new fridge when your display in it stops showing the calendar because it doesn't have a firmware update and the Google endpoint it talks to changes!
(large rolleyes goes here)
There is maybe $25 worth of raw material in a cell phone, and several thousand for a car. It is much more efficient to melt/crush them down and recycle the resources then fix them. Generally, speaking repaired things aren't as good as new, much less as capable as the new models. What we need to get better at is recycling the resources, which sadly we aren't doing.
What are you
smoking? You're on the wrong forum for this crap. May I suggest
www.consumeristsukka.com or something?
First, define "raw materials" cost, because the BOM for most modern cell phones is far north of $25, and the only way you're going to get your number is you ignore all the processing steps and energy involved - are you claiming a modern semiconductor is only the melt value of the sand and trace materials in it? Because that's nonsense, given the energy inputs alone, but it's the only way I can come up with to justify that number.
And as far as being efficient to crush something, that's also nonsense. The better option is to make things that can be repaired, not that have to be turned from finished product back into raw materials (which doesn't work for a lot of stuff, plastics don't recycle worth a damn). And as for "repaired not being as good as new," I further have to disagree, as I tend to repair things to "better than new." See Maru from Planes 2 for a good reflection of this attitude.
But, I suppose, if you're so invested in spending the money on the new thing that you want excuses to crush the old things, your approach works. It's just a personal economic disaster and a totally catastrophic environmental disaster, but...
yay I can finance a new thing!!!!!Gross.
Sure, in that particular case there was a fine alternate solution. But it is just one example of parts being discontinued.
Fine, but it wasn't a particularly good example to use, then. Shaft seals are hardly some exotic technology.
I mean, I've learned not to own "weird cars" as daily drivers, but neither did I have any trouble keeping them operational. It just sometimes took a local machine shop to do some work and milling.