Yes, because they make money selling the parts, and there are warranty requirements that are hard to fulfill if you don't have parts.
Often after a decade or so, companies will sell the designs to dedicated parts makers. For example, Volvo has Volvo Classic Parts, and they even have a reman program, and will even 3D print parts not available. Mercedes has Mercedes Classic Parts. Chrysler has MOPAR, etc.
If you are a business, the costs of designing the part has already been paid, if you can sell the design and get some royalty payments, why wouldn't you turn those old plans into cash?
And of course there is a huge industry of Chinese clones and other suppliers that will provide replacement parts that are not genuine.
This reminds me that in the early days of Tesla they were complaining about the difficulty of competing on pricing with established automakers because they subsidize the cost of the vehicle at sale with profits from selling parts/service - a stream of revenue unavailable to a startup
It’s still possible to order new and original parts for SAAB models, almost 20 years after they went under. The spare parts are made by a separate company which is still going.
IIRC, by law manufacturers are required to maintain parts and service for vehicles for a minimum of 10 years. Whether superseded, discontinued, whatever.
Do you actually look at the current US landscape and think “the law is just the law” for the rich and poor alike?
Getting a judge to rule on something is also part of that “the law is just the law” and it’s obvious that judges are more willing to rule on cases for the poor and powerless than the rich and connected.
The point I was trying to make was that whether or not something is illegal is typically decided by a judge.
Most of the things corporations do aren't as clear cut as a traffic violation. So in those cases, you only know if something is illegal when it's made it through the courts
This is an urban legend. Safety defects have to be remedied by the manufacturer for a period of 10 years, but that remedy doesn't have to involve replacement parts.
I agree, looks like you are correct. It seems that it is just one of those things that manufacturers have agreed to do voluntarily, in the absence of a specific law. I imagine they have calculated that the loss of goodwill from abandoning a product quickly would outweigh the cost savings (especially since there is so much sharing of parts that keeping a few specialty components on hand is not going to move the needle much).
Yes. Auto manufacturers tend to have contracts with different tiered automotive suppliers that have heavy-hitting production lines for current vehicles, and also maintain a 'service' department where these style of products are produced. The tools for producing these parts have really good lifetimes, and you can take the tooling and put it into whatever mold machine you have written the program for, or set it up for another machine.
In my experience service departments are basically a large warehouse with a small set of assembly machines running at any given time where you are setting up time to produce some random part for a day or two and then change to something else, whereas the real production assembly lines are designed to produce as many of X part for the latest car as possible.
Several of the old mold machines where I worked that made parts for this service business ran DOS, with PCMCIA cards to load programs. I helped a process engineer get these PCMCIA cards working on his contraband laptop running win98 (obviously banned from the network) because we could never get them working with anything newer. This was in like 2021.
It depends. Lots of parts are shared by multiple models or even companies so it may be the case that nobody has made for example a new water pump specifically for your car for 10 years, but the design is the same as the 2025 something else so you can just use that one. There are also warehouses with older parts that can last for years. You can also pull replacements from junked cars that have not been crushed yet. In some cases third parties manufacture replacement parts when the supply runs out, but those replacements are often of poor quality and sometimes are only vaguely shaped correctly and require extra work to actually fit on your vehicle. Keeping old cars running is a challenge, especially if the car was obscure when it was new.
For traditional vehicles, there's typically a large marketplace of first-party and third-party auto parts for vehicles going back several years. Depends on the make and model, but usually yes.
That said, Tesla is a very unusual automaker in most senses and I'm not sure what their aftermarket parts situation is.
This is a concern for me not only for the Tesla but for the new Chinese manufacturers. When I've talked to owners of these cars (in other countries), the consensus seems to be "you use it for 5 years and then throw it away". Not because the car has poor build quality, but because there aren't local mechanics that can service it, it's impossible to find documentation such as torque specs and service procedures for anything but trivial stuff you'd find in an owner's manual, and it is very hard to find parts.
It seems like an incredible waste to throw away a car after 5 years.
A big part of what I look for in a car is a long lasting manufacturer that publishes to end users technical and repair information, including part numbers and procedures, together with a healthy third party part supplier ecosystem and independent repair infrastructure.
That doesn't mean that information needs to be available for free or that the parts themselves are cheap -- Volvo parts are not cheap -- but they are available and the information, engine specifications, repair manuals and workshop manuals are available.
If you don't have that, I'm not interested in buying the car. A car is far too expensive to treat as a disposable consumer good. I'm worried that more and more, manufacturers are locking down their systems, putting information behind paywalls where you can't make your own backup copy, and doing things like adding DRM to their parts to prevent indy shops from working on them.
I think a part of it is down to demographics with disposable income. Teenagers have a taste of freedom and some pocket money and the next gimmick films is a good way to spend it. It's the same as they mature into 20 somethings. In their 30's they may be more career focused and have less time, a good chunk of them will tire of novelty and move towards more interesting/arthouse films. When kids come into the picture there's even less time and money so things change again, then the cycle repeats.
So, at least from my opinion, "new" will always be a good sales tactic to catch attention.
Not sure how the google one works, but does this introduce more risk?
If the parent is aware that your 'app block scam calls' does that make them more likely to believe a scam caller, if one get's through your screening?
Whereas if you educate the parent about the persistence and ever increasing complexity of scams, and they experience the calls and are competent to dismiss them, you make them more aware and more resilient in future - Scam awareness training of sorts.
Fair point — false sense of security is a real risk. The idea isn't to replace awareness, but to add a safety net. Even trained people slip up when caught off guard. But you're right that it shouldn't be install and forget.
Perhaps.... functionality will only be available to paid accounts/integrations.
OpenAI will be contractually bound to report offensive content, Disney Lawyers will get the direct contact details via the paid account to know the user and sue.
Not a lawyer but I'd be interested to know if you can sue an end user who uses AI ... In the past you could for using tools, but if AI has autonomy based solely on a prompt that might even open up free speech defenses
Purely conjecture on my part I might add! I have no affiliation to either company, but I know Disney likes to sue so if they are paying so much money... and putting their IP at risk... what's in it for them?
The real issue with these tools is taste. Most business people/clients have poor taste and they need creatives or engineers etc to actually rein them in, then produce the great work they need, gained through years of experience, and taste refinement .
The AI tools can produce the work, the quality can be good but taste is lost as the professionals are removed from the process.
There’s a quote I can’t remember the source of… “anyone can have an idea but not everyone can execute on it.”
AI gives the illusion you can create your ideas and compete with actual professionals
The ad is hilariously bad but McDonald’s has done many terrible ads over the years where “creatives” were involved eg the infamous random red couch ad.
This is an excellent example. It also highlights how if I tried this it would sound terrible as I lack have vocabulary to describe what I want, and how that relates to the code.
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