I agree with everything said in this article except the hope that "individuals will likely be walking into the same consumer experience expected from a modern day smartphone or flat screen TV. Switch it on, and it just works, every…single…day."
Uhhh... No. No for SEVERAL very big reasons!
1) Smartphones & TVs are largely solid-state devices. Bad designs aside, the only reasons they have for hardware failure are heat buildup, & user error (smashed against hard surface). In contrast, ebike drivetrains rely on many moving parts, most of which take impact loads from a variety of directions under the course of *normal* wear (not just when "dropped"). Motors with circuits & moving parts can never be as reliable as similar circuits without moving parts. *Never.* Literally impossible.
A TV might have some fans which could fail, but even then a fan is trivial to service compared to high power drive components.
Comparing ebike drivetrain reliability to solid-state devices is totally unrealistic.
2) *WHAT* device exactly "just works every single day"?!? I have never seen one. Perhaps you have no experience of TV service... In the last three years, the most expensive TVs & cheapest I've seen, had THE SAME (idiotic) design issues; fancy features & crap quality, across the board, in every brand I've found. We're talking every conceivable problem from loose factory connections, connections lacking proper strain relief, inadequate cooling by design (so quiet & efficient!), backlighting that rapidly becomes anything but uniform, power switches that have the infrared receiver built in so that both fail together; problems *no* device reaching high-volume production should have. (And these are just the hardware problems with TVs.)
Nearly all TVs are ready-made garbage, designed to be sent to the landfill in far less time than all but the crappiest cathode-ray-tubes TVs of old.
Cellphones are even worse. Most cellphones are designed to break easily (yes, including those with "hardened" screens; LOL). You know what material lets wireless through but doesn't shatter like a glass backing? *Plastic*, but that "felt cheap" supposedly; so glass cases it is! Again, idiotic design intended to fail.
If your phone's casing needs a case around it, that's a bad case! Phones can be made durable but aren't, because the market has come to expect something with a new "must have" feature every few years.
For a more realistic reliability comparison, look at motorcycles: Many motorcycle riders hardly get a few thousand miles before bad design or cheap materials cause something to fail; some others go tens of thousands of hours without major issue, on routine service alone... but in general, many motorcycle brands tend to spend a lot of time in the shop. Compare the difference in hours ridden per hour of shop time, between a Triumph Rocket Triple, & a Honda Valkyrie. Some riders have better or worse luck, but in general, the Honda gets more time on the road. Why? Because Triumph can sell bikes on factors like looks & sentiment (sentiments like "US brand" or "love their old bikes"), whereas a new motorcycle from Honda has to be built *better* than an otherwise comparable Triumph, to sell equally well.
Many auto aficionados will tell you "never buy the first year of a model" but consumers do that *constantly*, often in the misguided hope that a new model will magically shed the (often intentional) problems plaguing an earlier model. Worse, we often buy based on styling or non-critical features, rather than seeking the most reliable.
Which brings us yet again to the real problem: Features are prioritized over quality, in modern manufacturing.
The solution may sound crazy, because it reduces manufacturer profits that could go to R&D:
Buy used!
Buying *only* used goods, helps build a healthier market in multiple ways:
1) Funds the repair & maintenance infrastructure we *need* to keep our vehicles on the road.
2) Reduces new sales; again, this may sound counterintuitive, but manufacturers selling new equipment year after year have little financial motivation to offer good quality *or* support. Reducing sales of new models, ensures that parts sales to service centers remain a significant & important source of revenue. Car dealerships make a lot of money off service; often much more than off new sales! "Right to repair" gets lobbied against heavily for exactly this reason.
3) Aftermarket service & mods are essential ways of improving reliability. Buying used leaves (a lot!) more in your budget for upgrades & maintenance. The more money we pump into our local shops' labor & parts budgets, *instead* of new-unit sales to manufacturers, the harder it becomes for a manufacturer to stay in business selling crap that can scarcely be kept running. Those who produce parts & long-term upgrades aplenty, are allowed to flourish; whereas in a "buy new" market, they'd be wasting money.
Bottom line:
TVs & smartphones *aren't* reliable, nor built to last, & the reason is consumers buying new units instead of having old ones repaired.
I won't praise Bosch but one of the LBS who is selling many different motors said to me that Bosch is testing motors for 30.000 miles. I was shocked, I really can't believe it.
