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.
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 Whether superseded, discontinued, whatever.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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here you can browse parts for a 1968 Mercedes SEL: https://classicparts.mbusa.com/c-280sel-223
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.
Be prepared to pay, though :)
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.
But what happens when Musk decides the law doesn't apply to him...
The law will adapt, same as it adapted for OpenAI/Anthropic when they started doing piracy to train their LLMs
Nvidia started funding piracy sites too; https://torrentfreak.com/nvidia-contacted-annas-archive-to-s...
If you are billionaire+ it's "legal", and if not at least financially worth it + almost never punishment on management.
If you are worth xx'000 you personally go to jail, you get into very big troubles, and get ruined.
No? The law is just the law. But until someone actually gets a judge to rule that what they did is illegal...
Buying a 30M USD mansion to the daughter of the judge is going to fix that.
In a banana republic.
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.
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.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/interpretations/timereplcepartpollak12...
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).
It’s not about goodwill. Selling parts is simply a good business. The margins at authorized dealers are crazy.
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.
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.
A lot of parts are refurbished too. Transmissions, differentials for example.
Their subcontractors do.
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.