America's new millionaire class: Plumbers and HVAC entrepreneurs

With respect to car servicing, I'm getting a deja vu feeling. Like smartphones have made it almost impossible to get a phone repaired by third party companies, car makers are making it very hard to get their cars serviced anywhere other than their dealerships where they can overcharge everything. With so much (unnecessary?) technology in the cars these days, it's easy for them to slap more conditions on the owners and lock in services for years.

It’s not servicing so much as parts. A friend recently had a 4 year old car written off by insurance after a minor front end shunt. He was incredulous so bought the car back from the insurer as part of his settlement BUT the car is still off the road because the laserlight headlights are just over £5000 each from BMW and there’s no second hand ones of the right type available in the UK currently.

It’s quite a lot cheaper to rewire the car for the more common and cheaper Xenon HID headlight (it’s only £300 2nd hand) but a fairly big job with ZERO support from BMW for the conversion.

They might not have a choice but to do so.

UN Regulation 155 and ISO/SAE 21434 are going to require that intra-car communications require some sort of authentication system between computers. It's regulations attempting to get ahead of potential hacks for Vehicle to Everything (V2X) infrastructure.

Unfortunately this likely also means the ability to replace failed ECU's on a car will be only limited to car manufacturers willingness to explicitly authorize a part to be installed into a car, even genuinely OEM parts straight from the manufacturer. Don't know when it comes into force but it's on the way.

To be honest, that's a very BMW problem. Good enough reason to stay away from BMW (or any German car really).

One reason the most minor of collisions are so expensive to repair is that car designs no longer include bumpers.

When I consider to purchase a car, I investigate the cost of spare parts and repairs. Also are their spare parts available from other than the original manufacturer?

Bumpers that left the car drivable (i.e. lights still worked and stuff) after an X mph impact were required in the US in the 80s.

People complained a ton about those and how they made cars look ugly.

Hardly just a BMW/German problem.

How long are Teslas sitting in shops waiting for parts, these days?