this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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They're still overbuilding the modern steering column right now. EVs haven't started hitting the junkyard yet.
How so? Is it because they're switching to electric vs hydraulic?
No, I'm referring to the historical accounts of Henry Ford sending out engineers to see what hadn't failed on the Model T once it started hitting junkyards all over the US in the early 1910s. The engineers came back and said that almost universally, regardless if the vehicle had been crashed or not, the steering column still worked in over 90% of junked Model T's. When Henry Ford found that out, he redesigned the steering column to use 75% of the materials previously used.
The point of planned obsolescence is that, much like organic systems like our bodies, almost every single system in the product is built to minimum tolerances, so once one system starts to fail, all the systems fail at the same time.
HF may have been a racist Nazi asshole, but he literally built planned obsolescence the same way that nature did. There's no point in wasting energy to build something that will outlive its other complementary components by several lifetimes.