Comment by ACCount37

Comment by ACCount37 8 hours ago

8 replies

Repair shops are a necessity.

Not everyone can learn even the basics of car maintenance. There are a lot of drivers on the roads today who wouldn't be able to do even something as simple as top up the oil or change the tires. And actual repairs, even on older simpler cars, even with an exhaustive technical manual and modern learning aids like video tutorials or AR overlays? Fat fucking chance.

There are ways around that. You can keep the cars simple to repair and also expensive and unavailable, so that only the people with tech know-how and/or willingness to learn it get them. Make cars as tools for professionals and tech enthusiasts, like PCs were in the 80s or construction equipment is now. Or you can make the cars cheap and disposable enough that if one fails, you can just send it to a scrapyard and get a new one.

I don't like either of those workarounds, so repair shops are the least bad option.

tgv 3 hours ago

I visited Rumania around the year 2000. I remember being surprised by the sight of a whole bunch of similar Dacias at the end of a (muddy) street, in various state of disrepair. The person we visited explained that people were repairing their cars by taking parts from other cars, as there were no spares, or they were very expensive (the average Rumanian was pretty poor at that time). And since nearly everyone drove a Dacia 1300 (tried to guess the model; they looked like a Renault 12), there were plenty of donor cars around, and people learned how to fix their cars from their neighbours.

That can't last forever, of course, but it shows there are other ways.

somenameforme 8 hours ago

> Not everyone can learn even the basics of car maintenance.

Why do you think? Outside of extremely rare disabilities, I do not understand why you would believe this.

  • ACCount37 7 hours ago

    A lot of users have an extreme level of resistance to learning tech. Which applies even to the most simple of instruction-following operations.

    They aren't clinically retarded. They could learn those things if someone forced them to. But you, as a product developer, can't force them. It's utterly impractical to overcome that resistance for a mass market product.

    It's easier to make a car that doesn't require oil changes than it is to make every car owner learn to perform oil changes.

    • potato3732842 6 hours ago

      >It's easier to make a car that doesn't require oil changes than it is to make every car owner learn to perform oil changes.

      No, it's not. There's fairly low level physics and chemistry reasons you can't make a car that doesn't need oil changes. Oil changes could be about as difficult as swapping out toner cartridges if they cared to make it that way though.

      Please keep your Prius out of the left lane.

      • ACCount37 5 hours ago

        EVs are on the roads right now, and most of them don't require oil changes at all. The oil in sealed in the gearbox, with no combustion to foul it, and is rated for the lifetime of the entire car.

        And, have you ever seen a user? Like, an actual user, in person? 1 user in 5 is capable of swapping out toner cartridges. Kicking the can to the tech support dept (for oil changes: to the service shops) is how it's done in real life.

    • jojobas 5 hours ago

      Some 45% of current Americans around 25 years old hold an Associate degree or above.

      Looks like you're telling us that US college is on par with changing car oil.