alt Hacker News>There's a reason everyone calls them mobile phones with wheels.
Which is why I'm so baffled how and why the EU has spent so much time and effort regulating batteries and charging ports for phones, but still ignores this massive issue of ease of repairability and right to repair of personal vehicles that has been plaguing car owners since the ICE days and is now only getting worse with EVs, that's costing us a lot more money than what's costing users to pay Apple to replace your cracked display and dead battery.
It feels like they just keep going for the lowest hanging fruits to score easy wins that don't impact local industry, while ignoring the entire forest behind them.
Jarvis, pull up on the central HUD how much the EU car industry spent on lobbying in the EU over the last 15 years.
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Because the masses don't drive every day, they bike and use the train.
Any electric gear with the battery as its main wear part. Ebikes. Sit-on mowers. Cars.
This is about so much more than cost. Agency, autonomy, environment, efficiency, geopolitics even.
I refuse to buy drm'ed gear. The exception is second hand where I can reliably avoid the drm with little effort. At its simplest, that means never using specific drm'ed functionality. At its most complicated, that means mitm'ing an encrypted can bus.
The EU has scored wins there though.
The mobile phone industry turns product into landfill on a yearly or more frequent basis.
People might do a yearly model swap on a car, but the car itself stays on the road for 10-20 years.
Changing how it's built needs to be done cautiously, but also has a much longer payback period.
The EU is beholden to the Germans, ease of repair would wreck the profit margins of VAG, BMW and Daimler both because of reduced after-sales profits and due to cost increases to manufacturing and engineering.