If extra durability/lifespan (beyond the ~15 years that things already last) were possible with a small increase in cost, why wouldn’t manufacturers compete on this axis?
I’ll offer a slightly different take on this. Namely: there’s no reliable way to communicate this to customers at a decent lag time, so the actual price premium customers are expected to pay for this is too low to be worth it.
Warranty periods only matter given:
1. People are confident that the company will be around for the duration. 2. People are confident that the company will honor them. 3. People don’t mind the time/annoyance of potential warranty calls. 4. Warrantee periods are correlated with actual time-to-failures.
Unfortunately, 1 and 2 are not really possible now. Say you put out a new product with a 25y warranty. And you have a fund put aside to deal with failures. Great! Only… it’s a 25y warranty . That’s a long timespan. How do you protect against the next CEO running things into the ground? Or spinning off that small segment into a separate company with not enough of a fund due to “optimistic” estimates and then having that portion go bankrupt?
And meanwhile someone else will also put out a product with the same 25y warranty, where say 25% of products will fail within 10-15y and they are banking on people not to actually return them, and hence they can sell them cheaper. And so you get outcompeted on price.
I’ll offer a slightly different take on this. Namely: there’s no reliable way to communicate this to customers at a decent lag time, so the actual price premium customers are expected to pay for this is too low to be worth it.
Warranty periods only matter given:
1. People are confident that the company will be around for the duration.
2. People are confident that the company will honor them.
3. People don’t mind the time/annoyance of potential warranty calls.
4. Warrantee periods are correlated with actual time-to-failures.
Unfortunately, 1 and 2 are not really possible now. Say you put out a new product with a 25y warranty. And you have a fund put aside to deal with failures. Great! Only… it’s a 25y warranty . That’s a long timespan. How do you protect against the next CEO running things into the ground? Or spinning off that small segment into a separate company with not enough of a fund due to “optimistic” estimates and then having that portion go bankrupt?
And meanwhile someone else will also put out a product with the same 25y warranty, where say 25% of products will fail within 10-15y and they are banking on people not to actually return them, and hence they can sell them cheaper. And so you get outcompeted on price.