this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2024
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[–] _sideffect@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago

Spoiler: They won't.

[–] rsuri@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Wear and tear doesn't kill a car; rust does.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Back in the day you could buy whole (but small) parts, cut away the rusy one and solder in the new one (paint with anti rust paint). Did it on my cheap ass volvo 142 :-)

Maybe you can't do that any more because of complex crumple zones, but I bet we can do better. A car shouldn't just have a life span of 6-10 years.

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[–] latesleeper@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Climate change is getting rid of snow. No more salted roads. Cars will last forever

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[–] the_doktor@lemmy.zip 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (5 children)

Like the new LED lightbulbs. Buy one now and they last a year or so. I bought one of them WAY back when they were brand new and horribly expensive and the damn thing still works just fine.

Companies can't stand new technologies that just work. They have to build in planned obsolescence. See also: smartphones, especially iTrash that make you buy a new one every year or two because updates slow them down.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The problem with LEDs isn't the bit that emits lights. It's the power supply, specifically the electrolytic capacitors. Good designs either use higher quality caps, or use designs that avoid electrolytic caps altogether. Either one takes a bit more money, but the market is always in a race to the bottom.

Long term, I think we should be avoiding traditional light fixtures entirely. It's better to have a lot of little lights spread over an area rather than a few point sources in the room. That gives us the opportunity to separate the power supply from the lights entirely, like LED strips do.

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

The LEDs will also fail from overheating. LED bulbs don't last long in fully enclosed fixtures that were designed for incandescent bulbs.

If the bulb starts flickering, that's usually a bond wire failure in an LED. When the LED heats up the bond wire loses connection and it will reconnect when it cools down again. The LEDs are in series, so if one fails, the entire bulb goes out. Flickering can also be caused by a capacitor failure in a switch mode supply, but most LED bulbs use linear regulators with a high voltage series string of LEDs now, which also increases the chance of a bond wire failure.

The early LED bulbs that cost a fortune had huge aluminum heat sinks to keep them cool. The few that I had all lasted until the LEDs got dim.

[–] Cognitive_Dissident@lemm.ee 0 points 5 months ago

100% true, the first CREE bulbs I had would die in these damned enclosed pimple-like ceiling fixtures. I got them replaced but I now run them without the frosted glass domes on them so they don't overheat and get killed again.

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[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Good ones still last a long time. What fails is generally not the LED itself but the cheap-ass rectifier in a cheap-ass case that is optimised for production price instead of heat dissipation. The fixture can also be an issue as nobody designed for heat dissipation in the days of incandescent bulbs, you might be baking those poor capacitors.

And those kinds of bulbs will stay available because there's plenty of commercial users doing their due diligence on life-time costs. Washing machines, fridges? Yes, those too, though commercial ones aren't necessarily cheap. Want a solid pair of pants? Ask a construction crew what they're wearing.

[–] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 0 points 5 months ago

I bought about 20 Cree bulbs 5 years ago, 15 are on about 15 hours a day. I've had 2 fail in that time.

Not a bad record in my book.

Even the off brands, IKEA, Amazon, etc, seem to last as long. They're all in open fixtures, so no cooling issues.

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[–] chemicalwonka@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 5 months ago

Sometimes I think people don't understand how capitalism works...

[–] capital@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (5 children)

I would love to see a car company create a vehicle platform with battery replacements central to the design of the car. Make larger packs out of smaller units so their larger models (or simply longer range models) so they only have to make one kind of pack. Recycle old packs back into making newer ones to reduce the need to mine more materials.

Sure, charge me enough on the replacement to keep this cycle going. Buying a car you know will get battery (and therefore range) upgrades as time goes on is a no-brainer.

Imagine the goodwill and free word-of-mouth advertising you would receive if you went the extra mile and open sourced all the software for the vehicle and allowed users to modify it if they wanted. Make the car not look like dogshit and I imagine you'd do well.

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[–] frezik@midwest.social 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Which was also true of ICE cars. The Model T Ford had a major design flaw: everyone could work on it easily, parts were plentiful, and there was no reason to buy a replacement once you had it. In fact, there's enough of them still running, with an associated parts market, that you could still daily one if you wanted to.

[–] keyez@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago

So much so that TFLClassics on YouTube in Colorado bought a well maintained model T and drove it to the nearest dealership and had mechanics there change the oil and take it for a spin just the other week.

[–] exanime@lemmy.today 0 points 5 months ago (7 children)

I've been taught that capitalism is all about innovation... So I'm sure the perfect long life car is just around the corner, they wouldn't actually just build crappy cars just to force us in a never ending cycle of consumerism, right?... Right?

/S ... in case it wasn't on the nose enough

[–] Cryophilia@lemmy.world 0 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Planned obsolescence should be illegal and strongly punished

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