What does the oft-spoken phrase “built-in obsolescence” mean regarding motor vehicles?Several readers.
Built-in suggests “deliberately”. Obsolescent means something that does not last indefinitely and will need to be replaced. The full Thesaurus: dying out, becoming obsolete, going out of use, going out of fashion, on the decline, waning, disappearing, past its prime, ageing, moribund, on its last legs, outdated, old-fashioned, outmoded; informal on the way out, past it.
Some things bite the dust because a far superior product has been developed (the stone chisel became a quill pen became a dipping pen, then a fountain pen, a ball-point, a typewriter (the first one I owned did not have a shift lock – it had two decks of keyboards for caps and lower case), an electric typewriter, a ball typewriter, a computer keyboard...).
These became obsolete because they were superseded by something better; no fault was deliberately built-in; simply, no one had yet discovered or invented a way to take the shortcomings out. We could call that “inherent” obsolescence.
Built-in obsolescence is a deliberate “omission, fault or weakness” of something that might otherwise last too long, to the benefit of the customer, but limiting to the sales business and thence the manufacturing sector.
When the cut-throat razor (virtually a flick-knife!) used for shaving was first replaced by the single-edged “safety” razor blade, how long do you think the inventor/manufacturer waited before wondering whether both edges could be sharpened to double its service life, or whether two (or three) parallel blades might be better than one, or whether the quantity of steel in a blade could be reduced by 90 per cent in a cheaper plastic moulding?
We can be fairly sure that these advances were “built-in omissions” awaiting maximum profit from the original design before known advances were launched one at a time in profitable phases.
In a motoring context, built-in obsolescence is the full Thesaurus, driven almost entirely by business imperatives such as costs, demand/sales volumes, margins and competition.
Better technology is already known, but the design, engineering, materials and construction would cost more than most people could afford...even more because lower sales would erode economies of scale.
Mass production is designed to a specification-cost that maximises volumes. The current volume of motor business is an on-the-road fleet of well over one billion parts-buying vehicles, and annual additional sales of tens of millions of vehicles. Change either of those and you change a gigantic chunk of related business interests.
Margins on new cars have to be tight, because consumers have so many options to choose from – before (!) they buy. Spare parts pricing is the biggest beneficiary, because customers for those have already invested heavily in the brand and are thus captive to it.
To recognise how different the margins can be, investment must be made in all the design and equipment to make parts with which to assemble the vehicles in the first place, so churning out additional “spare” parts should improve scale economies and be “cheaper” than the collective original for assembly. But if you bought all the parts for a car over the counter, they would cost ten times as much as the car itself...and you would still have to assemble them.
Franchised OE parts supply and service are the lifeblood of motor distributors around the world. New cars are just the cream...and the key that unlocks the parts bonanza.
So, in a much simplified but illustrative sense, car makers don’t deliberately “fault” their designs, engineering, materials or construction systems. But they do “compromise” potentially higher quality in all those respects to achieve product appeal within a cost target. In mass production models, the result is not perfection. It has a degree of built-in obsolescence.
