California passes right-to-repair act guaranteeing seven years of parts for your phone::On September 12th, California passed SB 244 to its state Assembly, becoming the third state to pass a right-to-repair bill.
Misleading headline: it has not yet passed. It passed both the house and senate, but has not been signed by Gavin Newsom.
Surely that’s just a matter of time since he’s not at all beholden to the abusive industry fighting this, right? …Right??
This is good for all of us, as California is big enough that what companies do for them they do for all
The small motor industry broke that tradition. There are CARB compliant motors/equipment for the CA market, but if you’re not in CA or the 14 other states that adopted CARB, you can get cheaper non-CARB compliant motors/equipment. Industry decided it was more profitable to split the market.
Sure, that’s because California compliant motors have equipment added to make them compliant, it’s easy to continue selling those with the extra parts not installed
If you need repair equipment or parts, you’ll be able to buy them from California if your state doesn’t implement similar rules
Said this in a similar post, but the legislation doesnt prevent companies serializing their components, tying them to the software. Preventing completely independent repairs.
Why would you buy a phone from a company that serialises their components? C’mon, consumers aren’t that stupid! They would never spend money against their own good!
Monopoly
Do they also guarantee 7 years of parts for your electric car?
I’ve always wondered how there are auto parts for almost any major auto for years on end. Never enough to research it, but it’s curious.
wondered how there are auto parts
Because they produce them.
The newer car makers have yet to learn a lot in this regard.
Actually it’s way, way more complicated than that. The big automakers outsource most of their parts production. So any given part like a tail light or outside mirror is being manufactured by a third party. The automaker will place an order for say, a million tail lights to FOO manufacturing that specializes in tail lights. FOO manufacturing will then make 1.2 million of them and sell the extra 200,000 to auto parts stores, auto body shops, online retailers, etc. They’ll also retain the molds and templates necessary to make new ones should there be market demand.
Tesla makes all their own parts (mostly) and the market for aftermarket Tesla parts is quite small. This means there’s very little incentive for 3rd parties to step in and make Tesla parts. The side effect of this is that you can buy replacement parts for cars made by the big automakers for decades whereas parts for Teslas can become scarce once their production run is over.
Note: There’s a whole 3rd party market for unofficial parts/clones that I’m not going to go into. That’s where auto parts manufacturing and stocks get really complicated.
Between needing to be able to service warranties on new cars and parts commonality across different models, it makes sense for a manufacturer to contract their suppliers to continue to produce parts outside what’s needed for initial production (to a point).
After all, if a warranty outlier or defect develops down the road, it’s a lot more expensive to reinstall old tooling and restart production than to just have extra parts on hand.
The aftermarket also plays some role, especially when you get into vehicles with longer service life applications (trucks, emergency vehicles, taxis, etc.)
And so they’ll just make those “replaceable parts” fail after 6 months and make them super expensive to purchase.
They are going to take your money no matter what.
All this is going to accomplish is severely limiting the number of devices available to the consumers.
Only a few brands and models will meet the standard to be able to be sold, creating a government backed monopoly and driving the prices of those devices through the roof, while simultaneously creating a black market for unapproved devices.
People will start shopping out of state for devices to be able to have any kind of choice and not have to pay $2k for their new phone.
