As much as I love this, I fail to see how this would be able to be written into law. It’s basically gov mandated warranty period. If the goal is to have manufacturers make products that last, how long is long enough? What’s to say that they do the same thing and design products that fail right after warranty ends? Who decides if there is foul play in designing faulty products and how? Unless the gov makes their own product that lasts for 20 years and tells every other company to use this as a baseline otherwise get fined, I don’t know how they would be able to enforce this.
I just think this is a big gray area and it would be hard to make this cut and clear. The only thing I think they could do for now is to have companies provide repair manuals and provide parts for a set amount of years after product launch, and repairs should be able to be made by customers themselves without needing to go through 1st party verification like Apple requires with their phones.
Think you answered your own question there.
Mandated warranty periods. Pretty straight forward.
And they currently engineer product to have things fail right after their warranty expires, so, that’s not really a concern, since we’re already living with the that.
And they currently engineer product to have things fail right after their warranty expires, so, that’s not really a concern, since we’re already living with the that.
Which is exactly my point of why mandated warranty period does not really fix the core of the problem, which is intentionally making products not last. It’s just a bandaid solution (Yes I know a solution is still better than nothing, and may be the first step to address this issue). What I want to see is prolonging the life of a product by letting consumers freely fix their own stuff (parts, schematics, etc.) without the manufacturer locking things down, even after the warranty expires.
Let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Mandated warranty minimums and right to repair regulations are not mutually exclusive. We can do both, even if we don’t do them at the same time.
Samsung: god damnit, now we have to use the $0.30 washer instead of the $0.29 washer and itll last at least 10 years longer!
That’s 10s of millions in extra sales lost!
The spirit is willing, but the machine is spongy and bruised.
Bullshit. My aunt has a washing machine with all knobs and switches that’s probably 30+ years old and it still works fine.
They need to stop putting all these digital components into washing machines or make the boards standardized so they can be easily swapped out. These aren’t laptops that you toss after 3-5 years. Appliances should last 10-20 years.
Laptops should last longer than 3-5 years too. It should go without saying, but this is the internet.
Agreed but in most larger businesses swap out the laptops around 3-5 years.
Consumers use laptop 5-10+ until they die.
Framework like modular laptop would fix this. Need a new screen? No problem. Need a new processor? No problem.
Upgrade whatever is outdated and just that
Yeah but imagine if we had a laptop motherboard standard like desktops.
Instead of ATX it would be something like MLF - Modular Laptop Framework
Where there would be some board standard for laptop boards.
Then you get screen ribbon standards, keyboard ribbon standards, etc.
This would allow one to order a laptop case with screen, keyboard and touchpad. But you can pick your board, cpu, ram.
I know some companies have done GPU upgrades but how nice would it be to upgrade your 4 year old $3k laptop’s GPU?
Oh look! So much progress is being made since USA embargoed itself!
I know this is a joke, but it is important to point out for others that such policies get years to be designed, discussed and published in the EU.
And this law came into effect last July
Imagine, government of the people, by the people, and for the people - that’s crazy SoCiAlIsM talk!
Longer means more forever chemicals
Do you even know what forever chemicals are or do you think they’re a magic thing that are added to machines to make them last longer?
Companies literally add pfas to everything to make things last longer
Ahhh, so you are the type of dumb that heard the name and assumed the wrong interpretation and ran with it. The so-called “forever chemicals” are called that because they themselves don’t really break down, but they don’t give that property to other things. These “forever chemicals” are stuff like teflon, they’re stuff that doesn’t react with other things and that makes them nonstick, something that can be useful in a bunch of different things besides just nonstick pans, but because they’re so nonstick, it’s difficult to make them stay in the pan or whatever industrial machine they’re a part of, so they can flake off and be in the end product, in our food, water, soil and much more, and since like I said before they’re not reactive, they can just stay there as their molecules, forever. Using them in a machine doesn’t give the machine more durability or extends it’s work life, it just helps it not stick to stuff
Right, so if they break down faster the forever chemicals disappear faster. Is that what you mean?
I’d love to hear how you came to that conclusion.
Not necessarily, you can use more steel, stronger parts. And if forever chemicals become a problem, you can regulate them just like with everything else. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.
Not really, it means mechanically working longer not forever.
Back to the good old days when products were of higher quality. What a concept.
We have a Bosch washing machine we bought second hand 15 years ago for £50. It’s basic, not digital, but has all the functions we need. We’ve never had a problem with it. It will break one day but I’m hoping it lasts a lot longer still.
And to a world where repairing is both possible and feasible.
I’ve heard this from service techs who have worked on my refrigerator and dishwasher - major appliances in America last a third as long as they did 10 or 15 years ago.
I can tell you from firsthand experience it’s even worse than that. I had a washer that lasted me damn near 20 years that was made in the 90s. Finally decided to get a new set from Samsung. Made it just past warranty, or basically 1 year. The repair would have cost as much as the washer was new. Similar experience with an LG fridge. Bought it and the ice machine broke in it, TWICE, within the first year. Fuck these brands and their established hold on the market.
And that’s nothing. You know how they’re pushing for washing machines, dishwashers, etc. to be internet connected? Currently they’re forcing this for data mining purposes. But I have no doubt their real goal is to eventually make these devices like printers, with expensive consumables locked in by internet-connected DRM. They’ve already gotten people used to using dish and clothes detergent pods. How long until they’re putting everything in plastic cartridges, locking things down with DRM, and charging like printer companies do?
they are truly junk. the only goal of American industry, it seems, is to make more money than ever.
Always has been.
Money burns the world to the ground
My washing machine is around 25 years old. Not giving it up till its absolutely done haha. But since parts are relatively available, it might just be a few more years.
The washer, dryer, dishwasher and fridge my wife had when we got married were already old and all lasted 20 years more. The fridge was the first to go, and in the 12 years since then they have all been replaced twice.
Now, this is the trading standards that we all ask for; not “be more racist” or repeal the protection on lgbt. Christ, American fascism is the weirdest i have seen. Fascism in the past didn’t even try to dictate the laws and regulations of other countries.
“We will stop our tariffs if you accept our diseased, chlorinated chicken”
I don’t even understand what fascism means in each case on lemmy and whether it is a fixed term or some adaptive catch it all
I usually go by Umberto Eco’s points but some scholars added their own. By and large, most agree that aspects such as militarism, demonization of out-groups, belief in a strongman authority figure, and lack recognition of civil rights and liberties are key characteristics of fascism. Trump 2.0 has most if not all the characteristics of fascism. Even now, Trump refuses to comply with court orders, has police harass and grab people without lawful warrant, demonizes out-groups and threatening military action.
I think it is rather controversial to use it in this way
There are scholarly consensus already. It is not controversial. Unless you are trying to muddy the water.
Scholarly consensus that some president is fascist?
Fascism is a precise term for a specific political movement. not some “I don’t like this” adjective
Trump is the president who happens to be the leading figure of MAGA movement and Project 2025, which are unquestionably fascist movements, and seeing as how his administration deliberately ignore court rulings and thereby undermining civil liberties, which is the key characteristic of fascism.
key characteristic of fascism
That’s not true and even a glance at first encyclopaedia you can get your hands on can disprove this. This is a very broad characteristic of many ideologies such as Bolshevism
Yes, because then you have to recognize a lot of communists as fascist. Dessalines won’t like that.
“Red fascist” is a term used pejoratively, you know?
The definition I find useful is, Fascism is when an imperial power begins applying colonial policies to citizens in its core.
So, for a practical example, the United States has used extra-judicial black sites to disappear and torture people the CIA/pentagon deem enemies for decades. Locking up people in El Salvador without (constitutionally mandatory) trial or legal council is just that policy brought home.
What exactly is there to dispute with a government that is trying to carve a unitary executive out of a 3 branch system, admires Nazis, has ties to actual neo-Nazis and leaders who have literally seig heiled, and is currently turning an agency into the gestapo and deporting anyone he wants to concentration camps?
This is a fair point made in an absurd context
And work without apps.
You can buy LED lightbulbs that all have their own apps. It’s getting ridiculous
To be fair most do work without the app. The app is for remote control and other features like colors usually.
Just use home assistant, you don’t need their hubs/apps (assuming they use a standard like Zigbee or zwave). For wifi try tasmota.
They should just force them to open the API, this would be sufficient in most cases.
A welcome mandate, especially for electronics. However people are already throwing away so much perfectly fine furniture that I don‘t think it will help much in that regard. A lot of people want something new, not something that just works.
Where are you living? Here people give away (emmaus for example) or sell it online, for cheap equals you don’t even need to throw it away, someone comes and picks it up for you.
Those appliances are so simple too, making them durable is very low cost. Good move EU.
Where I live you can easily give your stuff away or donate it to a charity shop, but it’s a tiny bit less effort to chuck it in the trash so there are people who do that. Not all of them, thank god, but you can come across decent stuff every one in a while. Do have to say people are more likely to dump cheap stuff than reliable stuff from known brands.
This is absolutely true and sad, though I get a lot of free electronics to dismantle by rummaging through trash. People have no appreciation of the value of “used” items that either work perfectly fine or have a minor issue that prevents them from working but is easily fixable, e.g. a broken cable (I have many working devices that were thrown away because the cable is severed, which I could easily fix). I think only proper education in this regard will improve things long term.
Yeah they buy new because the advertisements give you idea that new is cool, brainwashing one into consuming. We should ban ads
Disposable culture is a blight on society…
People have been conditioned to throw away perfectly good shit, now we are surprised they throw away shit. This policy is obviously not gonna fix the issue on its own, but as you said, it’s welcome.
I specifically want new because I already know even the new won’t last long don’t even mind something someone has used for a few years already
Well, for furniture, I totally agree with you and honestly: I don’t think there is eomething wrong with redesigning your living room every 10 years, especially when you move around.
I mainly want to be able to buy old washing machines, dish washers, TVs, because I don’t care about their appearance.
If it’s quality furniture you can sell or donate it. If it’s recent Ikea or other cheap stuff, it won’t survive being disassembled, moved and reassembled. Ikea’s surfaces scratch so easily, even on desks. It’s ridiculous. That kind of fast furniture is terribly unsustainable. But I wouldn’t be bothered if you bought a new sofa every ten years and make someone else happy with a used sofa that will last another ten years in it’s new home.
If the produced stuff last longer it wouldn’t mean there would be less competition on innovation, people would still have a reason to sell you their old appliances because they want certain new function. This law is against making stuff that can’t be repaired or breaks easily. Don’t think you’d buy a 2 year old tv if it doesn’t work, right.
We really need to stop with this “build to break” mentality for products. Our wastes, as humanity, would significantly lower and reduce wastes…. But hey, we also have to think of the investor’s, right?
This is a good first step. The next would be to lower the ridiculous amount of electronics in them and remove wifi and telemetry functionality. A dish washer should never have to connect to a server to do its job.
I would like it to come with an open source firmware that I could connect to my locally hosted servers.
I would enjoy mapping out load weights, water and electricity consumption, and cross reference that with a lot of other stuff. Plus some remote controls, and a better interface to choosing washing programs and scheduling start/end…
I just don’t want any of that data to leave my house, ever.
Exactly this. Wifi is awesome. Some opaque server on the internet is not. Let me home assistant the shit out that load of dishes.
And have an easily accessed setting to turn it all off if you don’t want it. I’d even be okay with a physical switch. The short answere is, your appliance should do what you and only you want it to do, and you should be able to enforce that.
When buying future appliances, I have to be sure to get them from the EU. Standards in the US are going to be below the floor.
I’m liking the sound of “Made in EU = high quality”
Prepare to pay out the ass for that though. Between tariffs and a weakening dollar.
If you are in the EU yourself it’s not that bad. All my appliances are actually made in Germany, and they were mid-price (BSH and Liebherr, a bit more expensive than chinese/korean but with better efficiency, warranties and reviews).
Why? We don’t buy products like this from the US. If its imported its coming from China.
Quick edit: I clearly misread the comment you replied to
Electronics in general should last longer, just like back in the day.
Plenty of short-lived stuff back then, too. Survivorship bias means that all the stuff that happened to survive to today is not necessarily representative of the typical thing that was manufactured back then.
Well yes it’s ridiculous we have (in EU) a mandatory warranty of only 2 years on anything electronic.
Phones should be 5 years. Appliances should be 10 and cars 15 or 200k kilometers. How have we normalized the fact that it’s okay for a car to break down after two years and the manufacturer is not on the hook ?
Hell yeah. This is the good shit.
The three biggest things that kill a tyre are;
- shitty roads
- aggressive driving
- heavy vehicles (like EVs and oversized SUVs)
That said, cheaper tyres are typically made of cheaper compounds that age poorly.
That last point sticks with me.
I always used to get the cheapest, shittest tyres just because cost, but since I became a driving instructor a few years back I got into the mentality of thinking “I need decent tyres because I don’t want my learners to lose control of the car”
Normally I’d buy tyres once every 6-8 months after squeezing out every morsel of life from them, but my current Bridgestone tyres have been on for nearly a year now - doing driving instructor mileage on top of my usual - and they’re not showing any signs of needing replacing yet.
The fact is I’m actually saving money doing it this way, because whilst the tyres are more expensive, I’m replacing them much less often.
I’m going to try out Pirelli next because it sounds like they’ve started lining the inside of some of their tyres with that puncture repair stuff and padding them out with foam to significantly reduce road noise.
Obligatory Pratchett:
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
I’ve carried that with me for years. I always try to buy long-lasting quality items for this very reason.
Not to mention that, due to inflation, those ten dollar boots themselves will cost 20 to 30 dollars before long.
That’s weird. I’m changing tires every 2 to 3 years and so is the norm in Europe.
They did mention being a driving instructor. Driving (and teaching students to drive) all day every day is going to put a lot more wear on the tires than a typical driver.
They also mentioned getting good tires after they started doing that, not before
Yeah I put 30k+ miles on the car just doing instructing, then I often also drive when I go on holiday, putting at least a good 500-600 miles on the car if I go away on the weekend (which is often).
I’ve had dedicated works vehicles which I’ve put fewer miles on the clock 😂
Under inflation is terrible for longevity, handling, and safety. You should maintain proper tire pressure.
So is over-inflation. Always inflate to the correct pressure as per the placard. If you are driving in unusual conditions,
My little Jimny weighs bugger-all but needs Light Truck tyres. On-road pressure is a very light 26 PSI. If I am driving through Sand, Mud or Snow I will deflate to an appropriate pressure and drive slowly. If I am driving over rocky terrain, I will also deflate to an appropriate pressure for better adhesion.
As soon as I hit the Tarmac again, I will reinflate back to 26. If I am carrying more weight or towing, I will inflate the rear tyres to 29.
Never buy cheap tires - they are your only contact with the road. You can have the best car in the world, and shitty tires will make it worthless.
There are videos on the subject, making the point of buying good tires, cause they will save your life.
Same goes for wipers.
EVs are getting their own lines of tyres (supposedly) designed to handle the weight, torque and address range concerns.
shitty roads
Cars (as you said, some more, some less) themselves destroy roads
Not quite, something like 98% of road damage is caused by trucks. Damage increases exponentially with weight.
Passenger cars are getting heavier Light trucks (SUVs) are now being driven in lieu of compact station-wagons.
Vehicle classes are also getting larger and heavier. Subcompacts that used to weigh less than 1000kg are now about 1500kg and EV variants are over 2000kg!
I am talking about 40.000kg trucks. Anything below 3.500kg is basically harmless (in comparison).
It depends on what the roads were built for.
If they are built to handle 1500kg passenger cars, 3500kg behemoth SUVs and Pickups can really do some damage, especially at speed.
I don’t know of any road built for 1.500kg cars. Most are 40t, with some 12t and very few narrow and old ones with 3.5t (and usually have a 30 km/h limit).
