I don’t think there’s any solid argument that precludes people from doing maintenance on their own car. There’s always some form of inspection or monitoring that can be done. Brakes in particular are perfectly reasonable. I particularly miss ease of maintaining drum brakes. They were literally designed to be maintained by the end user, you pull the wheel, The drum slides right off and the parts are readily available. If you want to get fancy you could buy a tool to help you remove the spring.
Things should be designed to be maintained by the end user and the end user could choose to go to a mechanic if they wanted to.
Honestly what we’re running up against at this point with car maintenance is design to cost. Every part that is maintainable on a car could be designed to be easily maintainable for a cost. Rather than the manufacturer paying that cost, there making us pay the cost at the mechanic. You can literally buy repair parts that are easy and convenient to work with that are improvements over OEM.
In the case we’re talking about for this article it’s literally a wire on a lithium ion battery pack in a wrist mounted device that failed that they’re refusing to replace.
And it’s not like he’s going to fall out of the sky and land in somebody’s backyard.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
If inspection or monitoring were mandatory you’d have a point. But it isn’t mandatory. Not everywhere. Not even most places. Only 19 of the 50 states require vehicle safety inspections periodically. So at most the vast majority of vehicles probably haven’t had one since the car was new unless the state where that car is registered requires it. For a country that’s very car dependent with car accidents being one of the leading causes of death in the US, that’s terrifying.