laundry machine from the 1980 did maybe 400 or 600 U/min for spinning while nowadays 1600 U/min is usual. Duration of a washing cycle has probably tripled (1 h vs. 3 h), and there are spinning cycles in between now, whereas there used to be only a final one.
They cite Miele engineering their machines for 5000 washing cycles or 20 years, while e.g. Whilpool, BSH and Electrolux use 2009 washing cycles and 10 years.
machines from the 70s and 80s needed about 4+ times as much energy (and also much more detergent powder and water) to achieve the same cleaning results as a machine from 2004
They find that 75% of laundry machines break at their first owner, and for those machines the average age went down from 12.5 to 11.6 years from 2004 to 2012⁄13. The fraction of laundry machines that breaks within the first 5 years has increased a lot (6 → 15% of those that break, i.e. 4.5 → 11.25% of all laundry machines).
there are huge differences between the cheaper and the expensive categories: e.g. after 5 1⁄2 years’ equivalent, 25 % of the 350 − 550 EUR machines are broken, in contrast to 8 % of the > 700 EUR machines.
It seems that it’s still possible to buy quality washing machine’s if you don’t choose a budget model.
Skeptics question to factcheck the main claim about washing machines: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/37733/do-the-motors-of-washers-last-only-1-3-to-1-4-as-long-as-they-used-to
Highlites from the answer:
It seems that it’s still possible to buy quality washing machine’s if you don’t choose a budget model.