I sympathise with people living near those disaster areas, but the risks are rather overblown.
No the risks are not at all overblown. And even if they were people's reactions to them are predictably irrational. Nobody is going to sit around calmly when there has been a natural disaster combined with a potential nuclear meltdown.
Death toll from Chernobyl is about 4000. Fukushima is at zero last I checked.
Lots of people died at Fukashima but most of them died (est 1600) due to the chaotic evacuation that ensued. A death is a death and those would not have occurred if not for the power plant failure so it's perfectly appropriate to tie them to the Fukashima event. The evacuation was necessary because you can't wait around to see if the radiation gets too high.
People used to be afraid of solar eclipses. Now they are bette informed. Maybe we need the same with nuclear.
There is a huge difference. Solar eclipses demonstrably present no actual danger. Nuclear power plants demonstrably present a very real danger. No amount of education will change that fact.
You mean the folks that received between 1 and 15 mSv for the inhabitants of the affected areas?
No I mean the mass evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people, billions of dollars in damage, loss of homes, an estimated 1600 deaths due to the poorly managed evacuations (mostly elderly), and decades of cleanup that resulted. It was a mess and that should surprise no one. You HAVE to account for how people are going to react in the case of even a potential radiation event. People aren't rational and even when the ultimate physical damage turns out to be not that bad you can't assume that is the case during a containment failure event. Nuclear power is quite safe... until it isn't. And then it is extremely not safe. And it is VERY expensive when even the potential of a major failure occurs.
Not to mention that we are failing and continue to fail to adequately address the waste problem. Both high level and low level. NIMBY is a real thing and it's hard to tell people they shouldn't be worried about radioactive waste even if that is actually true in fact. Don't get me wrong, I'm actually a proponent of nuclear power. I just think we need to be realistic about both the positive and negative aspects of it.
High-level waste is compact and mostly solid -- shield it, store it, and don't freak out about it.
Tell that to the folks who used to live near Fukushima. Or Chernobyl. Nuclear power is very safe... until it isn't. Nuclear waste is mostly manageable but incredibly toxic and nobody wants it nearby.
Far better than pumping tons of pollutants into the air from burning fossil fools.
Probably true but definitely not without problems. And people are a lot less scared of fossil fuels even if they shouldn't be.
Nuclear fission reactors are clean and produce continuous power.
They produce little carbon pollution and other particulates but they are decidedly NOT clean. Nuclear waste is the very definition of not clean. Manageable maybe but not clean and certainly dangerous.
Collusion is illegal already so we don't need anything new here. Fraud is also illegal. If these companies colluded or engaged in fraud, the law enforcement part of government needs to engage and deal with it.
Yes those things are illegal but it still requires an active and motivated regulator to enforce the laws and to define what is permitted in the inevitable corner cases and unexpected circumstances. Right now we CLEARLY do not have that.
we don't want to do anything to disrupt the free market because the net result of government intervention isn't good for anybody.
You seem rather dogmatic about the idea that government involvement is always bad. I disagree. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. You can have too much or too little. The job of the government is to keep a free market doing its thing but then be ready to step in when it fails. Our health care system sucks because we have a government doing too little and not being involved enough. Our justice system puts too many people in jail because it the government is over involved. The idea that government intervention is always bad is just foolish ideology run amok.
Auto repair shops are rife with fraudulent practices that are hard to prove, but this isn't universally true of all auto shops.
That's not an excuse for sitting idly by and praying that the all powerful market will somehow fix the problems. We've been dealing with auto shops ripping people off for decades and the market clearly has not fixed the problem nor is there any plausible likelihood of that changing. The market has failed far too often to just sit around and hope it will be better next time.
Just rest assured that fraudsters will eventually be dealt with in the marketplace.
No. I'm not satisfied with such an approach. Waiting for the market to do its thing is why we had a massive housing crash in 2008. Markets do not always work and I think your faith in them is excessive.
Instead, there are multiple connector holders in the box which can be filled or not, and the connectors themselves of course can have pins installed or not. Audi then packaged each vehicle with a standard harness which is in all vehicles, a national harness which is country-specific, and accessory harnesses.
I've seen various attempts at doing this or something like it but I've yet to see an automaker actually force their engineers to design a common electrical system across all or even most of their cars and platforms. Would be a HUGE benefit but it would take a lot of planning and firm orders from high up in the company. Most electrical system design in cars is shockingly ad-hoc in design. VW has been better than most at keeping stuff common across their products.
Personally I think a better solution for a LOT of car wiring would be to go to a system something along the lines of a robust version of something similar to USB-C or Firewire or ethernet for data communications with some circuit boards embedded in components and between compartments. Think of it something like a standardized ethernet backbone for cars. It should be able to carry power too up to a reasonable amount similar to USB-C. Every component should be able to connect to it. High power stuff obviously could still use some dedicated conductors but signalling should all go through the common system which would be identical between vehicles. Taken to its logical conclusion you could in theory make most of the cables and connections in the car identical or nearly so which makes the physical bit of wiring very simple, easy to install, and easy to design/update/fix via software. They'd have to drive the logic boards into the components and make a LOT of them to get the costs to something reasonable. They've done some stuff like CANBUS which was an idea not taken nearly far enough. Right now basically every car has its wiring system designed more or less from scratch which is just bonkers.
In my book it'd actually be better to put the PCM inside the vehicle (as Nissan does) but make the connections inside a box like Audi put everything into in my car, which would then only contain connectors, relays, and fuses. I like keeping the computer where it's safe and cozy.
I could be fine with it either way. The problem isn't so much the location as it is the lack of standardization. There is SO little in the way of standardized components, standard design practices, etc in vehicle wiring that most people just don't really think about but the cost of it at the end of the day is enormous. It makes the engineering, installation, servicing, and testing far more difficult than it should be.
250K... Why would you get rid of a Honda that's barely broken in?
Ha! Honestly? Boredom and fuel economy. It's a fine vehicle (a Ridgeline) and in good shape but I've had it for close to a decade and I'm getting a little tired of it. Probably will drive it for another 2-3 years and then look for something different. Plus the fuel economy for the horsepower isn't very good. Around 17-20mpg and I can get a half ton pickup these days that gets over 30mpg so that's pretty poor for 250HP. I'm kind of surprised Honda hasn't come out with a hybrid version of the Ridgeline because I would definitely consider upgrading to that if they did it right. But instead they made a boring pickup version of a Pilot which is fine but unremarkable.
I did have to replace the engine on it about 80K miles ago due to rod knocking but the replacement cost me $3000 and only had 8K miles on it so I expect to be able to drive it for a long time if I want to.
Honda Genuine(TM) parts have always been expensive, especially as models get superseded.
As a general proposition all OEM branded parts are relatively expensive. Honda is par for the course here but the good news is that you don't generally need a lot of parts because it doesn't break much.
I don't know about a Nissan Frontier, but my 1989 240SX had a "super multiple junction" at the firewall that avoided having to do that.
It's called a bulkhead connector. They're a good and unfortunately underutilized idea, mostly because they tend to be rather expensive. It's not unusual for a weather sealed bulkhead connector with 30 positions to cost $15-30 wholesale for each of the mating halves. A 100 circuit bulkhead would be VERY expensive. A big OEM could negotiate that price a lot lower but regardless the cost is relatively high compared with the cost of paying someone $15/hour to feed the wires through. Plus it isn't just he connector, you have to terminate (and possibly seal) each of the wires which adds additional cost. And you have the additional engineering costs too AND you have to maintain additional part numbers.
So it's a good idea that tends to get tanked by the economics. It would be a LOT cheaper and more common if wire harness parts were more standardized than they are but as I'm typing this I'm looking at a bookshelf full of catalogs of wire harness connectors and terminals. There are SO many more parts than are actually reasonable or necessary but very little is standardized so there is little chance for economies of scale to do their thing and drive prices down.
Of course it does. That's why the phrase "as a general proposition" is at the start of the post. In GENERAL Honda vehicles are among the more reliable and affordable to maintain vehicles out there. Every automaker has exceptions but some have fewer than others.
What I'm really saying is that I'd rather let the free market fix issues like this because the alternative solutions are worse.
While I'm by all means a proponent of free markets there are some cases where you do need the government to step in. Fraud, deception, and collusion are some of the cases where it is necessary. I don't have any problem with honest brokers charging what-the-market-will-bear prices. The problem comes when they start taking advantage of people who aren't in a position to defend themselves or worse when they start colluding to eliminate competition. People shouldn't have to be experts in car repairs to have a reasonable expectation of receiving good service for a fair price and I'm sure you know damn well that people get ripped off by car repair shops routinely.
When you have your broken car up on a lift it's a little bit like a surgeon negotiating prices with you once he's got you on the operating table and opened up. You're not really in a position to negotiate at that point and the repair shop knows it. Good luck getting the free market to work in your favor at that point.
Government market controls don't fix these problems, because in that case you'd be sitting in your broken car because that $500 harness worth $4 in parts would not be in stock, anywhere at any price.
I think you are fearing something far more heavy handed than is necessary. I'm not talking about government price controls (a stupid idea in this context) and never even hinted at anything similar. But when a ground of automakers are tacitly colluding by (wink, wink) all using the same software "independently" to price discriminate then that is a problem. That violates anti-trust regulations most likely. Now we have companies effectively forming a cartel and breaking the market. The role of the government is to keep the competition honest, vigorous, and ongoing which should be possible here. Heavier regulations should only come into play when it is not possible or practical to have a properly competitive market (like with non-elective health care, utilities, or law enforcement for example). I'm arguing FOR keeping market forces working by having the government stop those who would prefer less competition.
Because sometimes I'M the one who has to pay the absurd markups. I also care that you don't get taken to the cleaners too albeit somewhat less for obvious reasons. I don't begrudge anyone making a decent profit. But let's not pretend that car repair shops have a sterling reputation for honest business practices. Just because someone could get away with taking advantage of someone doesn't make it right to actually do it.
The harness is easier to install during production if it has as few connectors as possible.
Speaking as someone who makes harnesses for OEMs, minimizing the number and variety of connectors does not appear to be a substantial concern of the automakers. You would not believe how fragmented the wire harness industry is.
Why are there huge wiring harasses in the first place? Wouldn't it make more sense to have many smaller harnesses that are easier to replace small sections of without having to disassemble half the car?
Actually it would be more expensive because of the component costs. Plus it's actually pretty rare that you have to replace an entire harness if it is low voltage. You'd spend a lot of money modularizing the harness which would be hard for the manufacturer to recoup. That said, a lot of harnesses are reasonably modular where possible/practical. But wire is cheap and connectors are not.
There also is the problem of lack of standardization of connectors and terminals and other parts. There are literally tens of thousands of different terminal options and connector options, the vast majority of which are unnecessary and redundant. But no one is in a position to force standardization so we end up with stupidly fragmented design choices.
What actually might make sense though would be for the various automakers to come up with a standard for data transmission (think firewire or similar and god no not CANBUS) so they could use standardized cables and connectors throughout instead of designing a custom harness for every vehicle. Then you just worry about lengths and software. The component cost would be somewhat higher (esp at first) but in the long run it would make power and data in cars much easier to deal with.
A while back, Toyota claimed I needed a new exhaust pipe for my Echo - $2,900 for the part alone.
Surprisingly the dealers generally aren't competitive on exhaust components. Usually cheaper to go to an exhaust specialist like Midas or similar. I actually had a dealer tell me that one time when I needed a new muffler. He was honest that they could do it but I would (and did) save a lot of money going to a specialist for that.
As a general proposition they're generally pretty affordable to maintain. They're generally pretty high on the reliability charts and speaking from first hand experience the maintenance on them is generally pretty reasonable in comparison to other makes. I've got a Honda with around 180K miles on it and I expect to get to 250K baring something odd happening.
I find it is a double edged sword... yes, you pay whatever the dealership/car company is charging for parts... but they also have standardised the labour costs.
"Standardized"? I do labor costing for a living. Those "standard rates" dealers offer have precious little to do with the actual cost of providing service. Dealer service times are HEAVILY padded for obvious reasons.
You can end up paying so much more in labour costs when you don't go to the dealer it isn't funny.
I can say the exact opposite and it is equally true. I had a relay that needed replacing in one of my cars. Cost of the part was about $70 bucks. Dealer wanted (no joke) nearly $1000 to replace it and tried to tack on a bunch of unnecessary stuff as well. My local shade tree mechanic charged be $120 parts and labor.
So because of this there's a huge potential market for compatible spare parts. Are there places where I can type a VW part number and get the equivalent alibaba part or somesuch ?
It's not that easy. There are about 30,000 parts in a typical car and a substantial number of these parts are not shared with other cars. The number of car parts that one could do enough service volume to justify the engineering time to replace them is a pretty small number. Plus most OEMs factor in buying a bunch of service parts. And you have to compete with the used parts market (stuff from wrecks). The car parts market is SO fragmented it's really hard to get any decent economies of scale on a given part.
Makes me wonder what automobile make is the best for TCO, over the long haul.
Generally speaking the one with the cars that break down the least. My guess would be Toyota would be pretty high on the list of best TCO. They tend to top most reliability surveys.
If the market sustains that price, why shouldn't the retailer be able to sell it at that price?
Nobody said they couldn't. Just pointing out that the fact that hefty markups occur on service parts is hardly a shocking revelation.
What stops the manufacturer from undercutting by selling direct?
A variety of things. 1) You don't make a part for someone and then sell it yourself unless that is agreed to in advance. That's a great way to get lawyers involved and piss off customers when you start selling someone's product out the back door. 2) Most of the manufacturers don't have the sales channel to sell it themselves and would not find it economical to develop one. 3) There often are contractual stipulations about such things including confidentiality requirements and intellectual property rights issues.
If you can sell that $500 wiring harness for $100 and make money, why don't you?
We cannot sell it for that much because we don't have someone with a broken car sitting in our lobby with their pants figuratively around their ankles.
Despite a fancy phrase (survivorship bias) everything you said is still bullshit hand-waving...
A "fancy phrase" that you apparently are incapable of understanding. If a "fancy phrase" scares you then maybe go somewhere with a dumber crowd more your speed.
You can't 'explain away' or handwave the FACT that books will outlast all the format-shifting.
SOME books might. MOST books will not. I suggest you study the difference. Using the few books to survive hundreds of years as evidence that books as a whole are profoundly durable is a dumb argument. It takes fairly heroic efforts or incredible luck to keep paper in readable condition for hundreds of years. Most of it decomposes long before then.
The fact that some things can be emulated doesn't mean they will be or that it will be done well. It also utterly fails to address the role of DRM.
DRM does not affect most digital content in any way. And had you bothered to actually read you would have noticed I explicitly said that regardless of format (books or digital) some of the content is going to get lost in the sands of time.
Oh and just like homeboy, I have *many* books from the 1800's and turn of the century. They are in fine shape and perfectly readable. So.... bullshit flag thrown.
You have a FEW books from the 1800s (assuming you aren't lying). Far more books from that era are residing in landfills. You have the fortunate few that survived. That does not constitute proof of the durability of books as a general proposition or that it is superior to digital data.
Nissan Frontier - mice or squirrels damaged the wiring. The labor cost was even more than the parts cost, $3700 all told. Fortunately my insurance covered this under Comprehensive coverage (less my deductible, of course.)
Ahh so the engine harness? Then that actually wasn't that outrageous a markup compared to some I've seen. We make and sell harnesses like that and they typically cost between $250-700 to make depending on complexity. I'm not actually surprised the labor cost more than the part. Pulling some of those things out and replacing them is a HUGE pain especially if they go through the firewall and under the dash.
Of course I've had an entire engine replaced for about that amount of money so...
Production costs alone do not dictate the retail price - especially with vehicle parts, some of them can be kinda heavy - distribution logistics increases the price more than manufacturing sometimes...
My point was that production costs have almost NOTHING to do with the retail price in many cases. I've seen parts my company makes being sold at a dealer for 8X what I know for a fact it cost to make them. There is some overhead in there to be sure but most of that price difference is just markups by every company that touched it along the way with the markups getting much bigger when it is a retail customer.
Got one from a wrecker for 140$, if I could have waited, could have ordered the part from amazon brand new for 180$.
Comparing prices from a part from a wreck to new parts isn't really apples to apples. The cost of the materials in the part alone almost certainly exceed the cost of labor to remove it from a vehicle and sell it. Basically if you can get the part new for comparable money to the same part out of a wreck then the person selling you the part from the wreck is ripping you off. If you could get the part "brand new" from Amazon for that much less then it is probably either surplus inventory being liquidated (or stolen inventory being liquidated) or it isn't the exact same part from the same supplier most likely. It's basically impossible to make a part cheaply enough to sell it for the same price as a part from a wreck.
It might be really annoying (like when I got charged $1500 for a replacement wiring harness for my truck)
Out of professional curiosity (I make wire harnesses for a living) what harness were you having replaced? If it's one of the big body or engine harnesses that might not be a bad price once labor is included. Installing those is a huge PITA and they can cost several hundred dollars to make. We make an engine harness for a V8 bifuel vehicle that we sell for around $300 each. Our customer obviously marks that up somewhat.;-)
Ever had the nagging suspicion that your car's manufacturer was charging outrageous prices for parts simply because it could?
Suspicion? No. It's a well known fact. There is a reason car dealers have terrible reputations for ripping of their customers. Of course the markups on service parts is huge. Anyone who didn't know this is an idiot.
My day job is running a small manufacturing company that makes (mostly) car parts. I know what the markup is on the stuff we sell. As a crude rule of thumb you can take whatever they charge you and divide by 8 and chances are good that's about how much the company that actually made the part sold it for. My company makes wire harnesses and I've seen products that have maybe $5 worth of material content and maybe double that in labor and overhead being sold for north of $300. One of the sales reps we work with from a big distributor told me a story about how he saw a guy buying a harness for his car ahead of him in line at the dealer. He started laughing and when they asked him why he said "I sell every component that goes into that harness and you are holding maybe $4 in material". The sale price on the harness was $540.
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I sympathise with people living near those disaster areas, but the risks are rather overblown.
No the risks are not at all overblown. And even if they were people's reactions to them are predictably irrational. Nobody is going to sit around calmly when there has been a natural disaster combined with a potential nuclear meltdown.
Death toll from Chernobyl is about 4000. Fukushima is at zero last I checked.
Lots of people died at Fukashima but most of them died (est 1600) due to the chaotic evacuation that ensued. A death is a death and those would not have occurred if not for the power plant failure so it's perfectly appropriate to tie them to the Fukashima event. The evacuation was necessary because you can't wait around to see if the radiation gets too high.
People used to be afraid of solar eclipses. Now they are bette informed. Maybe we need the same with nuclear.
There is a huge difference. Solar eclipses demonstrably present no actual danger. Nuclear power plants demonstrably present a very real danger. No amount of education will change that fact.
You mean the folks that received between 1 and 15 mSv for the inhabitants of the affected areas?
No I mean the mass evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people, billions of dollars in damage, loss of homes, an estimated 1600 deaths due to the poorly managed evacuations (mostly elderly), and decades of cleanup that resulted. It was a mess and that should surprise no one. You HAVE to account for how people are going to react in the case of even a potential radiation event. People aren't rational and even when the ultimate physical damage turns out to be not that bad you can't assume that is the case during a containment failure event. Nuclear power is quite safe... until it isn't. And then it is extremely not safe. And it is VERY expensive when even the potential of a major failure occurs.
Not to mention that we are failing and continue to fail to adequately address the waste problem. Both high level and low level. NIMBY is a real thing and it's hard to tell people they shouldn't be worried about radioactive waste even if that is actually true in fact. Don't get me wrong, I'm actually a proponent of nuclear power. I just think we need to be realistic about both the positive and negative aspects of it.
High-level waste is compact and mostly solid -- shield it, store it, and don't freak out about it.
Tell that to the folks who used to live near Fukushima. Or Chernobyl. Nuclear power is very safe... until it isn't. Nuclear waste is mostly manageable but incredibly toxic and nobody wants it nearby.
Far better than pumping tons of pollutants into the air from burning fossil fools.
Probably true but definitely not without problems. And people are a lot less scared of fossil fuels even if they shouldn't be.
Nuclear fission reactors are clean and produce continuous power.
They produce little carbon pollution and other particulates but they are decidedly NOT clean. Nuclear waste is the very definition of not clean. Manageable maybe but not clean and certainly dangerous.
Collusion is illegal already so we don't need anything new here. Fraud is also illegal. If these companies colluded or engaged in fraud, the law enforcement part of government needs to engage and deal with it.
Yes those things are illegal but it still requires an active and motivated regulator to enforce the laws and to define what is permitted in the inevitable corner cases and unexpected circumstances. Right now we CLEARLY do not have that.
we don't want to do anything to disrupt the free market because the net result of government intervention isn't good for anybody.
You seem rather dogmatic about the idea that government involvement is always bad. I disagree. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. You can have too much or too little. The job of the government is to keep a free market doing its thing but then be ready to step in when it fails. Our health care system sucks because we have a government doing too little and not being involved enough. Our justice system puts too many people in jail because it the government is over involved. The idea that government intervention is always bad is just foolish ideology run amok.
Auto repair shops are rife with fraudulent practices that are hard to prove, but this isn't universally true of all auto shops.
That's not an excuse for sitting idly by and praying that the all powerful market will somehow fix the problems. We've been dealing with auto shops ripping people off for decades and the market clearly has not fixed the problem nor is there any plausible likelihood of that changing. The market has failed far too often to just sit around and hope it will be better next time.
Just rest assured that fraudsters will eventually be dealt with in the marketplace.
No. I'm not satisfied with such an approach. Waiting for the market to do its thing is why we had a massive housing crash in 2008. Markets do not always work and I think your faith in them is excessive.
Instead, there are multiple connector holders in the box which can be filled or not, and the connectors themselves of course can have pins installed or not. Audi then packaged each vehicle with a standard harness which is in all vehicles, a national harness which is country-specific, and accessory harnesses.
I've seen various attempts at doing this or something like it but I've yet to see an automaker actually force their engineers to design a common electrical system across all or even most of their cars and platforms. Would be a HUGE benefit but it would take a lot of planning and firm orders from high up in the company. Most electrical system design in cars is shockingly ad-hoc in design. VW has been better than most at keeping stuff common across their products.
Personally I think a better solution for a LOT of car wiring would be to go to a system something along the lines of a robust version of something similar to USB-C or Firewire or ethernet for data communications with some circuit boards embedded in components and between compartments. Think of it something like a standardized ethernet backbone for cars. It should be able to carry power too up to a reasonable amount similar to USB-C. Every component should be able to connect to it. High power stuff obviously could still use some dedicated conductors but signalling should all go through the common system which would be identical between vehicles. Taken to its logical conclusion you could in theory make most of the cables and connections in the car identical or nearly so which makes the physical bit of wiring very simple, easy to install, and easy to design/update/fix via software. They'd have to drive the logic boards into the components and make a LOT of them to get the costs to something reasonable. They've done some stuff like CANBUS which was an idea not taken nearly far enough. Right now basically every car has its wiring system designed more or less from scratch which is just bonkers.
In my book it'd actually be better to put the PCM inside the vehicle (as Nissan does) but make the connections inside a box like Audi put everything into in my car, which would then only contain connectors, relays, and fuses. I like keeping the computer where it's safe and cozy.
I could be fine with it either way. The problem isn't so much the location as it is the lack of standardization. There is SO little in the way of standardized components, standard design practices, etc in vehicle wiring that most people just don't really think about but the cost of it at the end of the day is enormous. It makes the engineering, installation, servicing, and testing far more difficult than it should be.
250K... Why would you get rid of a Honda that's barely broken in?
Ha! Honestly? Boredom and fuel economy. It's a fine vehicle (a Ridgeline) and in good shape but I've had it for close to a decade and I'm getting a little tired of it. Probably will drive it for another 2-3 years and then look for something different. Plus the fuel economy for the horsepower isn't very good. Around 17-20mpg and I can get a half ton pickup these days that gets over 30mpg so that's pretty poor for 250HP. I'm kind of surprised Honda hasn't come out with a hybrid version of the Ridgeline because I would definitely consider upgrading to that if they did it right. But instead they made a boring pickup version of a Pilot which is fine but unremarkable.
I did have to replace the engine on it about 80K miles ago due to rod knocking but the replacement cost me $3000 and only had 8K miles on it so I expect to be able to drive it for a long time if I want to.
Honda Genuine(TM) parts have always been expensive, especially as models get superseded.
As a general proposition all OEM branded parts are relatively expensive. Honda is par for the course here but the good news is that you don't generally need a lot of parts because it doesn't break much.
I don't know about a Nissan Frontier, but my 1989 240SX had a "super multiple junction" at the firewall that avoided having to do that.
It's called a bulkhead connector. They're a good and unfortunately underutilized idea, mostly because they tend to be rather expensive. It's not unusual for a weather sealed bulkhead connector with 30 positions to cost $15-30 wholesale for each of the mating halves. A 100 circuit bulkhead would be VERY expensive. A big OEM could negotiate that price a lot lower but regardless the cost is relatively high compared with the cost of paying someone $15/hour to feed the wires through. Plus it isn't just he connector, you have to terminate (and possibly seal) each of the wires which adds additional cost. And you have the additional engineering costs too AND you have to maintain additional part numbers.
So it's a good idea that tends to get tanked by the economics. It would be a LOT cheaper and more common if wire harness parts were more standardized than they are but as I'm typing this I'm looking at a bookshelf full of catalogs of wire harness connectors and terminals. There are SO many more parts than are actually reasonable or necessary but very little is standardized so there is little chance for economies of scale to do their thing and drive prices down.
I think it depends on the model.
Of course it does. That's why the phrase "as a general proposition" is at the start of the post. In GENERAL Honda vehicles are among the more reliable and affordable to maintain vehicles out there. Every automaker has exceptions but some have fewer than others.
What I'm really saying is that I'd rather let the free market fix issues like this because the alternative solutions are worse.
While I'm by all means a proponent of free markets there are some cases where you do need the government to step in. Fraud, deception, and collusion are some of the cases where it is necessary. I don't have any problem with honest brokers charging what-the-market-will-bear prices. The problem comes when they start taking advantage of people who aren't in a position to defend themselves or worse when they start colluding to eliminate competition. People shouldn't have to be experts in car repairs to have a reasonable expectation of receiving good service for a fair price and I'm sure you know damn well that people get ripped off by car repair shops routinely.
When you have your broken car up on a lift it's a little bit like a surgeon negotiating prices with you once he's got you on the operating table and opened up. You're not really in a position to negotiate at that point and the repair shop knows it. Good luck getting the free market to work in your favor at that point.
Government market controls don't fix these problems, because in that case you'd be sitting in your broken car because that $500 harness worth $4 in parts would not be in stock, anywhere at any price.
I think you are fearing something far more heavy handed than is necessary. I'm not talking about government price controls (a stupid idea in this context) and never even hinted at anything similar. But when a ground of automakers are tacitly colluding by (wink, wink) all using the same software "independently" to price discriminate then that is a problem. That violates anti-trust regulations most likely. Now we have companies effectively forming a cartel and breaking the market. The role of the government is to keep the competition honest, vigorous, and ongoing which should be possible here. Heavier regulations should only come into play when it is not possible or practical to have a properly competitive market (like with non-elective health care, utilities, or law enforcement for example). I'm arguing FOR keeping market forces working by having the government stop those who would prefer less competition.
Then why do you care what the retailer charges?
Because sometimes I'M the one who has to pay the absurd markups. I also care that you don't get taken to the cleaners too albeit somewhat less for obvious reasons. I don't begrudge anyone making a decent profit. But let's not pretend that car repair shops have a sterling reputation for honest business practices. Just because someone could get away with taking advantage of someone doesn't make it right to actually do it.
The harness is easier to install during production if it has as few connectors as possible.
Speaking as someone who makes harnesses for OEMs, minimizing the number and variety of connectors does not appear to be a substantial concern of the automakers. You would not believe how fragmented the wire harness industry is.
Why are there huge wiring harasses in the first place? Wouldn't it make more sense to have many smaller harnesses that are easier to replace small sections of without having to disassemble half the car?
Actually it would be more expensive because of the component costs. Plus it's actually pretty rare that you have to replace an entire harness if it is low voltage. You'd spend a lot of money modularizing the harness which would be hard for the manufacturer to recoup. That said, a lot of harnesses are reasonably modular where possible/practical. But wire is cheap and connectors are not.
There also is the problem of lack of standardization of connectors and terminals and other parts. There are literally tens of thousands of different terminal options and connector options, the vast majority of which are unnecessary and redundant. But no one is in a position to force standardization so we end up with stupidly fragmented design choices.
What actually might make sense though would be for the various automakers to come up with a standard for data transmission (think firewire or similar and god no not CANBUS) so they could use standardized cables and connectors throughout instead of designing a custom harness for every vehicle. Then you just worry about lengths and software. The component cost would be somewhat higher (esp at first) but in the long run it would make power and data in cars much easier to deal with.
A while back, Toyota claimed I needed a new exhaust pipe for my Echo - $2,900 for the part alone.
Surprisingly the dealers generally aren't competitive on exhaust components. Usually cheaper to go to an exhaust specialist like Midas or similar. I actually had a dealer tell me that one time when I needed a new muffler. He was honest that they could do it but I would (and did) save a lot of money going to a specialist for that.
Are Honda's expensive to maintain?
As a general proposition they're generally pretty affordable to maintain. They're generally pretty high on the reliability charts and speaking from first hand experience the maintenance on them is generally pretty reasonable in comparison to other makes. I've got a Honda with around 180K miles on it and I expect to get to 250K baring something odd happening.
I find it is a double edged sword ... yes, you pay whatever the dealership/car company is charging for parts ... but they also have standardised the labour costs.
"Standardized"? I do labor costing for a living. Those "standard rates" dealers offer have precious little to do with the actual cost of providing service. Dealer service times are HEAVILY padded for obvious reasons.
You can end up paying so much more in labour costs when you don't go to the dealer it isn't funny.
I can say the exact opposite and it is equally true. I had a relay that needed replacing in one of my cars. Cost of the part was about $70 bucks. Dealer wanted (no joke) nearly $1000 to replace it and tried to tack on a bunch of unnecessary stuff as well. My local shade tree mechanic charged be $120 parts and labor.
So because of this there's a huge potential market for compatible spare parts. Are there places where I can type a VW part number and get the equivalent alibaba part or somesuch ?
It's not that easy. There are about 30,000 parts in a typical car and a substantial number of these parts are not shared with other cars. The number of car parts that one could do enough service volume to justify the engineering time to replace them is a pretty small number. Plus most OEMs factor in buying a bunch of service parts. And you have to compete with the used parts market (stuff from wrecks). The car parts market is SO fragmented it's really hard to get any decent economies of scale on a given part.
Makes me wonder what automobile make is the best for TCO, over the long haul.
Generally speaking the one with the cars that break down the least. My guess would be Toyota would be pretty high on the list of best TCO. They tend to top most reliability surveys.
If the market sustains that price, why shouldn't the retailer be able to sell it at that price?
Nobody said they couldn't. Just pointing out that the fact that hefty markups occur on service parts is hardly a shocking revelation.
What stops the manufacturer from undercutting by selling direct?
A variety of things. 1) You don't make a part for someone and then sell it yourself unless that is agreed to in advance. That's a great way to get lawyers involved and piss off customers when you start selling someone's product out the back door. 2) Most of the manufacturers don't have the sales channel to sell it themselves and would not find it economical to develop one. 3) There often are contractual stipulations about such things including confidentiality requirements and intellectual property rights issues.
If you can sell that $500 wiring harness for $100 and make money, why don't you?
We cannot sell it for that much because we don't have someone with a broken car sitting in our lobby with their pants figuratively around their ankles.
Despite a fancy phrase (survivorship bias) everything you said is still bullshit hand-waving...
A "fancy phrase" that you apparently are incapable of understanding. If a "fancy phrase" scares you then maybe go somewhere with a dumber crowd more your speed.
You can't 'explain away' or handwave the FACT that books will outlast all the format-shifting.
SOME books might. MOST books will not. I suggest you study the difference. Using the few books to survive hundreds of years as evidence that books as a whole are profoundly durable is a dumb argument. It takes fairly heroic efforts or incredible luck to keep paper in readable condition for hundreds of years. Most of it decomposes long before then.
The fact that some things can be emulated doesn't mean they will be or that it will be done well. It also utterly fails to address the role of DRM.
DRM does not affect most digital content in any way. And had you bothered to actually read you would have noticed I explicitly said that regardless of format (books or digital) some of the content is going to get lost in the sands of time.
Oh and just like homeboy, I have *many* books from the 1800's and turn of the century. They are in fine shape and perfectly readable. So.... bullshit flag thrown.
You have a FEW books from the 1800s (assuming you aren't lying). Far more books from that era are residing in landfills. You have the fortunate few that survived. That does not constitute proof of the durability of books as a general proposition or that it is superior to digital data.
Nissan Frontier - mice or squirrels damaged the wiring. The labor cost was even more than the parts cost, $3700 all told. Fortunately my insurance covered this under Comprehensive coverage (less my deductible, of course.)
Ahh so the engine harness? Then that actually wasn't that outrageous a markup compared to some I've seen. We make and sell harnesses like that and they typically cost between $250-700 to make depending on complexity. I'm not actually surprised the labor cost more than the part. Pulling some of those things out and replacing them is a HUGE pain especially if they go through the firewall and under the dash.
Of course I've had an entire engine replaced for about that amount of money so...
Production costs alone do not dictate the retail price - especially with vehicle parts, some of them can be kinda heavy - distribution logistics increases the price more than manufacturing sometimes...
My point was that production costs have almost NOTHING to do with the retail price in many cases. I've seen parts my company makes being sold at a dealer for 8X what I know for a fact it cost to make them. There is some overhead in there to be sure but most of that price difference is just markups by every company that touched it along the way with the markups getting much bigger when it is a retail customer.
Got one from a wrecker for 140$, if I could have waited, could have ordered the part from amazon brand new for 180$.
Comparing prices from a part from a wreck to new parts isn't really apples to apples. The cost of the materials in the part alone almost certainly exceed the cost of labor to remove it from a vehicle and sell it. Basically if you can get the part new for comparable money to the same part out of a wreck then the person selling you the part from the wreck is ripping you off. If you could get the part "brand new" from Amazon for that much less then it is probably either surplus inventory being liquidated (or stolen inventory being liquidated) or it isn't the exact same part from the same supplier most likely. It's basically impossible to make a part cheaply enough to sell it for the same price as a part from a wreck.
It might be really annoying (like when I got charged $1500 for a replacement wiring harness for my truck)
Out of professional curiosity (I make wire harnesses for a living) what harness were you having replaced? If it's one of the big body or engine harnesses that might not be a bad price once labor is included. Installing those is a huge PITA and they can cost several hundred dollars to make. We make an engine harness for a V8 bifuel vehicle that we sell for around $300 each. Our customer obviously marks that up somewhat. ;-)
Ever had the nagging suspicion that your car's manufacturer was charging outrageous prices for parts simply because it could?
Suspicion? No. It's a well known fact. There is a reason car dealers have terrible reputations for ripping of their customers. Of course the markups on service parts is huge. Anyone who didn't know this is an idiot.
My day job is running a small manufacturing company that makes (mostly) car parts. I know what the markup is on the stuff we sell. As a crude rule of thumb you can take whatever they charge you and divide by 8 and chances are good that's about how much the company that actually made the part sold it for. My company makes wire harnesses and I've seen products that have maybe $5 worth of material content and maybe double that in labor and overhead being sold for north of $300. One of the sales reps we work with from a big distributor told me a story about how he saw a guy buying a harness for his car ahead of him in line at the dealer. He started laughing and when they asked him why he said "I sell every component that goes into that harness and you are holding maybe $4 in material". The sale price on the harness was $540.