[cycleworld.com] - It’s Often Cheaper to Replace Than to Repair

[Ninjette Newsbot]

Mechanical and electrical goods have become cheaper to replace than repair. Are we getting closer to that in motorcycles?

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Kevin Cameron has been writing about motorcycles for nearly 50 years, first for Cycle magazine and, since 1992, for Cycle World. (Robert Martin/)Scott McKay’s comment on my recent story “What is a Crate Engine?” reminded me of my experience with a VCR years ago. Some small thing had gone wrong with it and, having grown up in the ‘50s, it was my natural reflex to see if I could fix it. Of course what I discovered was that the VCR was a dense and complicated gadget, originally manufactured in a specialized facility where costs—in money and time—had been expertly driven as close to zero as possible. Trying to match that achievement on my kitchen table was a sucker’s game, as indicated by the low price of a replacement VCR.



There is another point. As anyone who has auto repair experience, cars are another system that is designed for assembly and not for repair. As a colleague once put it, “You hafta take off the frame to get at the spark plugs.”

Why is that? Because the engine and transmission are built on a separate line and are then routed under the chassis line such that a lift robot can precisely position the unit in the car with nearly zero clearance all around. This limits access to strange beings with long slender arms like eels.


Mechanical and electrical goods have become cheaper to replace than repair. Are we getting closer to that in motorcycles? (Akinom, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons/)The third force discouraging the DIY impulse is the tremendous cost of mechanical labor. The VCR may have cost $12 to produce, but to get a technician out of a chair to walk over to the now-defective unit easily costs 10 times that. This is the wonderful thing about automated manufacturing: It brings complex technologies within the reach of so many of us, but the high cost of service makes it more economical to replace than to repair.

In the past, technology changed slowly enough that design-for-repair still made sense. During World War II large aircraft piston engines were frequently replaced, which required that all their many accessories be tediously shifted from the old engine to the new one. The British hit upon the idea of locating the accessories on a separate unit that stayed with the aircraft, but was driven by a short U-jointed shaft from the back of the engine.

Today’s much shorter product cycle makes such design-for-service irrelevant. Marketing helps this along by assuring us that buying the new model saves us the humiliation of showing up on something dull and obsolete. Popular author John Grisham once described in passing the feelings of a fairly successful lawyer, arriving for a big legal conference in his shabby older private jet. He sees the lineup of sharp new Gulfstream G650s of more prestigious firms, so his pilot hides the thing behind a hangar.

You’ve heard of the “right-to-repair” movement? It is a response to the strong trend toward complete vertical integration—service may be performed only by the manufacturer, and any attempt to DIY will void warranty.

Some say that in a not-too-distant future everything will be solved by not owning anything—not a house, not a car, not a laptop, or even a phone. All will be rented. If anything goes wrong, a replacement unit will appear.