Hello Andrew, On Sat, 2013-01-05 at 21:57 +1100, Andrew McGlashan wrote:
On 5/01/2013 9:43 PM, Mark Trickett wrote:
Wrong. There are "consumable" products, for better or worse, but there are also many "durable" products out there. Note hat there is nothing "eternal", everything has a finite life. It is a matter of trying to make the life appropriate, and to deal with the worn out item. We need to learn to close the loop. Good engineers are always working on the balance. This is also part of why I am unbiased about cars, I bucket both GM and Ford for their inadequacies. I can still keep a 30 year old VW MkI Golf GLD on the road, and it is still competent to stay on the road.
Okay well, sure eternal sure is a stretch, but I would rather replace things after they wear out with a reasonable life expectancy -- or repair them if it is a viable option.
There is an appropriate life. For food, think about a "Twinkie" sitting on a mantelpiece for ten or twenty years, unwrapped, and still looks the same as when it was taken from the packet. Not quite sure of the real food value there. Some things are better not made repairable, some are. I dislike the way that car parts are more "assemblies" these days, rather than the small part that breaks. I can understand some of it when I consider the manufacturing process.
For most "consumable" things I would most rather do an upgrade because I am happy to upgrade in order to get more features or a better product (newer tech for example) and not because they break before a reasonable lifetime. I dread electronic equipment with "timer" chips that "know" when warranty has expired and then "randomly" fail....
Obsolete merely means it works, but that approach is not good for ongoing sales. STC used to make refrigerators, but the business folded, they lasted too well, so too few replacement sales. If you can do a relatively durable product that is also acceptable in other ways, and get a reputation, there is a space in the market.
I'm not sure a 30 year old VW MkI Golf GLD would be as safe as any of the new cars of today, but I do like that idea. I've only ever bought ONE brand new car, it's the VE Commodore (3 years old now), it doesn't even have a glove box light -- and that makes we wonder what else they are choosing to save a dollar or so on. The factory bluetooth won't even display the incoming caller ID either, but a cheap Aldi unit I had in my older car does that fine.
The Golf would be safer than the Commodore, it actually handles. GM and Ford have improved, but still a long way to go. It does have "crumple zones", and is quite economical, never under 600Km for the 45 liters of diesel, and it will stretch to over 1000Km, with a little care. The Golf was the first of the cars where they used Finite Element Analysis to tune the body shell structure. As a result, the stresses are reasonably uniformly distributed, it does not have the stress concentration points. Also it has near zero torque steer, and does not pull when one side is slipping under braking. Some quite fancy design that has stood the test of time. Newer does not mean better.
Cheers A.
Regards, Mark Trickett