Reviewers have limited data with which to rate longer-term reliability. Nobody can blame them for not doing-the-impossible.
The actual friction point is the subtle divergence of expectations. "User review" is a psychologically powerful concept - an extension of the "my friend/neighbour told me this" trust elevation.
But paradoxically, in today's popular society the reach of any given user review is (quasi) proportional to the amount of commercial involvement driving the exposure. Providing the platform, its userbase, and incentivising the content creator by metric of popularity.
So, now we have entire (minor) demographics in the business of finding new things to review. Class-leading tool of amazing reliability already exists for 10 years and is the benchmark for enduring quality in the field? That is wonderful, but the career reviewer still needs to review 10 new good-bad-and-ugly ones each year. Several will get a positive overall verdict from the reviewer, and some followers who make their purchase choices based upon the latest opinion they've heard from a person-of-respect will go out and buy those ones.
A reviewer who ended every new review for several years with "..but overall, the industry consensus of the Old Trusty 2000 is still the wisest holistic choice" would not be terribly compatible with the evolved world of User Reviews that we have.
There's also the matter of "the Old Trusty" being a dying species. Seemingly every brand I heard of being reliable - Bosch, Milwaukee, Toyota, Sony, Victorinox, Michelin, Dyson, possibly more - has gone to shit in the recent decade.
For various reasons I don't consult Backblaze stats much nowadays, but I wish this kind of reliability and failure rate information were more available for other products, especially LED light bulbs.
I tried to make a "unicorn" review on AliExpress. IIRC you can only write a review in the first 30 or 90 days. Too bad because I was going to sell the praises of the thing.
Honestly, the first set is the replacement for department stores where you could go and experience the product for yourself. They try to solve the problem of the first impression you might get. For example, I have been in the market for an over-ear bluetooth headphone, and as a result started checking online reviews. There are a ton of audio review sites now that do lab acoustic testing, mic samples, write articles with details about dimensions, weight, build quality, materials used, head comfort, cup depth, clamping force, ANC performance, etc.
Extremely detailed and generally great testing. Though tbh, if you were in a department store with all the options in front of you, you would give them all a try and pick the one that you like the most. You can evaluate half of these variables for yourself in a moment by holding and trying it out. If you're an audiophile, then you would can have your music and give each a listen in the store and decide better than a curve graph.
I spent a ton of times reading all the reviews and narrowing down the options, but was still between 3 or 4. Ended up driving 45 minutes to the nearest bestbuy and they had a decent selection. It was amazing how quickly I eliminated options and ended up picking one I liked.
I learned this lesson with my Kia Telluride. Rave reviews, but it was a new model without years of data behind it.
At 70,000 miles very expensive parts began to break down like clockwork, like the very complicated alternator, and even small accidents racked up $10,000-$20,000 repair bills. Insurance paid for it, but the car was out of commission for a month each time.
I can’t fault the reviewers exactly, but I learned a lesson that there may be something to longer, proven designs that have been battle tested over millions of collective miles.
That is why Toyota is so popular in the US: They are extremely reliable.
(I personally don't drive them, but many of my family members love them.)
If you want to keep a new car 10+ years, they're generally a safe bet. Related: I had very little problems with my 2018 Tesla Model 3, but traded it in at 6.5 years because I needed a larger vehicle for my family.
Cars are different nowadays (hopefully even more reliable), but the '95 Toyota Camry that my parents bought new in 1995 or 1996 lasted until I was done using it in college in 2011. Then my dad sold it for a chunk of cash. The only thing wrong with it was that the roof paint was gone to shit from the Florida sun. You could probably paint it, redo the ceiling fabric, and run it for another 10 years. They sunk a fair amount into it over the years, but nothing catastrophic -- no powertrain issues, no "fixing this AC will cost more than the car" issues. In the six years I drove it I think it needed about $300 of work (something about the steering or suspension).
There are lots of Camry from 2008 to 2017 which has paint delamination issue. Ours is from 2012 but it only started getting noticeably worse near the end of the warranty period and I never heard about it because it was during the pandemic and our dealer went out of business. Toyota didn't publicize the issue till the end.
Family member had a rav4 prime instrument cluster go black. Spent 4+ months without that vehicle while they were trying to figure that shit out. No idea if this is common, but those cars aren't exactly readily available so they were stuck with a Corolla for a long time.
I think it depends on were you live. The roads in my country are high quality and the winters are soft. You'd actually have to try really hard to wreck any car in 10 years.
For second hand cars, here in Australia we have a youtuber that goes by the name ReDriven, this guy Adam reviews second hand cars specifically and focuses on reliability, and what it's like to live with. He's got a mate who's a mechanic that details all the specific mechanical problems that they see with the cars.
Such an insanely useful little channel and they do amazing work.
I think small accidents == large bills is caused by the amount of sensors and crumple zones in cars.
Layered on top of that is the massively increased cost of parts and labor to install the parts and paint them. And cars aren't really made to be taken apart easily.
Then there is the issue of availability of parts, especially in newer cars.
All of that makes it so that there are a 100+ cars outside the body-shop I frequently pass by. Because of the speed (or slowness) of the pipeline, body-shops need to be a certain size. Then insurance tries to squeeze them, and people don't get paid enough for the work they actually do.
So that's why your repaired bumper is 2 tints darker than your body. No-one has the time to properly blend the paints.
> And cars aren't really made to be taken apart easily.
This is a major contributor for specific models. I was listening to my brother complain about a vehicle that rolled into their shop lately and how the engineers really didn’t think about how difficult it would be for technicians to service things. Some parts are fairly inexpensive and easy to replace but you have to remove the engine or transmission in order to get enough clearance to swap out the part!
It's there even for parts that require regular replacement. For example, VW GTIs have required removing the bumper and taking a decent amount of stuff off the car in order to replace the headlights. This has been the case since at least 2007. Granted with LED headlights this isn't as much of an issue but prior generations had xenon headlights which required replacement periodically.
Same on my 14-year-old Honda van. The sane way to replace the HID bulbs (or the ballast or the ignitor, because HID things) is to remove the headlight housings, and the first step of doing that is removing the front bumper cover. It's not completely awful, but it's not exactly awesome either.
The less-sane way to replace just-the-bulb is from the top. It seems like it should be faster, and it sure does look easier, but it's a blind one-handed process with little fiddly bits to manipulate. There's not enough room to add a reasonably-stout glove to that hand, and there wouldn't be enough dexterity and tactile sense if there were. Consequently, there will be blood. I'm told that it's a lot more practical to swap a bulb in-situ with the halogen housings (as those don't have as much depth to them as the ones for HID), but my Honda is not so-endowed.
Part of this is because, AFAICT, the headlight assemblies are structural. They tie into several other assemblies and help hold the front of the vehicle together.
(A pedestrian Buick or Chevrolet from ~20 years ago is very different: To remove a headlight assembly, just lift up on a couple of heavy nylon straps and the whole shebang basically just falls out. It takes seconds. Reinstallation is very nearly as quick.)
I replaced the heater core on a 1987 Ford XF Falcon. In hindsight, it would’ve been easier to pull the motor out and cut myself an access panel in the firewall than it was to disassemble and reassemble the dash.
Certainly not new. Though the space under the hood remains fairly constant, the free space has decreased. There are more and more components becoming difficult to reach and service while they’re among the first to wear out.
One interesting thing I noticed about Chinese vehicles is that the expensive sensor arrays are commonly mounted on the roof, presumably safe from small fender benders. Hopefully Western manufacturers will pick up that feature.
Ideally that would be the place to keep them. It'd also help with not having to recalibrate the sensor arrays due to bumps that might not damage anything but which jostle things a bit. I think recalibration essentially requires an expensive visit to the dealer since the software needed to do it is dealer only or extremely expensive for independent mechanics.
If you're conservative and buying something as critical as a daily use car it makes a lot of sense to get second or later model year of the second or later generation since a major redesign. Preferably a model that has been sold in high volumes and used heavily as a taxi or something. Then at least you will know the most likely problems before you buy.
Can’t be true of their brake lights. One of my hobbies is alerting people to burnt-out tail lights, and every time I see a Soul I pay particular attention to it, because at least 1 out of every 4 cars has a light or two out.
That's not why. The Soul like other small cars (eg. Fit, Yaris, Accent) saw shrinking uptake from consumers.
People on HN love talking about small cars, but purchasing data has shown otherwise in most markets.
The Kia Soul was also heavy hit by tariffs on South Korean automotive exports in North America and the EU as well as the sanctions on Russia, as it was manufactured and assembled in Kia's Gwangju and Kaliningrad factories. Btw, the Russian factory now assembles Chinese cars for the Russian and Belarusian market.
The second generation Soul was Kia's best selling vehicle in the U.S., and for Honda the Fit was their third best seller behind the CR-V and Civic. The issue wasn't that people weren't buying them. They absolutely were. The issue was that dealer allocations kept getting lower and lower as the manufacturers pushed CUVs and SUVs more and more after 2006. 2008 delayed that shift since big SUVs were seen as icons of the crash, but by 2011 the shift resumed. CAFE standards made it infeasible to sell the smaller cars because their development and testing was more expensive thanks to the footprint rule. Since the U.S. was the second largest market behind China and China was already overcrowded in the A and B segments, the moment that the U.S. stopped being enough of a profit center (around 2014) those segments got axed. When they deemed it too narrow in profits for the C segment (around 2018) that also got axed. Honda and Toyota are the only holdouts with the Civic and Corolla because Europe and Asia love the things, and while those two markets are only 30% of the size of the U.S. in terms of sales per year that's still big enough to justify keeping it around. Especially as the Civic now has no competition except the Corolla in the U.S. since Ford, GM, Stellantis, Nissan, Hyundai, Geely, and Tata all abandoned hatchbacks, coupes, and sedans. It's all down to loopholes and perverse incentives betraying the buying public once again.
It’s not quite a full long term review, but I always liked when car mags did the “live with it for 3 months” section across a load of people. Average reviews don’t have that behind them typically.
I could take my car from the dealer and drive it for 30 minutes and learn not a lot. I could live with it for a month, and learn that it doesn’t make the wagon cover go back and forth automatically like the old one, the infotainment restarts twice as often, I can’t have X and Y visible at the same time in the digital dash, the armrest is a bit of a pain to reposition up and down if there’s a coffee in the holder, the coins rattle in the coin bin…
The “I’ve had this a year” review is always a lot more helpful.
I think it's a scale issue. A small group or individual can build up a trusted source of reviews, but the brand is worth a lot compared to people who are selling things, compared to the direct revenue from people who are buying.
So the incentive to sell is way more than people will pay for the reviews.
Combine that with a timing problem, a review at one year is pointless to new car buyers, since the new model is a bit different.
I worked at a company that tried that 15 years ago. The problem is that the incentives for such businesses is perverse. It’s basically impossible to avoid people trashing a competitor’s product to promote their own, paid reviews, taking fees from manufacturers for making good reviews more visible for them (gotta pay the bills), all sorts of things that eventually makes your business unreliable just like all others.
There's the Michelin star thing, not sure if / how they monetize it but it's not making them any poorer. And there's some consumer organizations like (in the Netherlands) the Consumentenbond which has subscribers, but it's a bit more like a union than a review company.
Happy fellow TR7 owner here, though I am curious if Whirlpool’s latest foray into seemingly reliable washers will pose any real threat/competition. The TR7 is definitely one that “just works” and fades into the background of your life.
Sadly Bosch didn’t take the same tack; the prospect of slurping up all that sweet, sweet data must have been too hard to resist. I love my 800 series dishwasher but I do wish it were as “dumb” as the TR7.
Who can tell which Whirlpool appliances are actually quality? It's so hard to trust anybody. Between the short-time-horizon thinking of public companies driven by the share price and the brand cannibalism of Private Equity, the brand you thought was reliable a couple years ago is today dialing up short-term gains so that its current leadership can gut the company and retire.
Reviews are so easily gamed that it's hard to trust them. Only companies with small product lines can build and maintain a durable reputation for quality.
I like my Bosch dishwasher, too. Never connected it to wifi; never downloaded the app. It broadcasts a Bluetooth channel I wish I could turn off, but I've not seen any other ill effect. There's just no compelling use-case for a "connected" dishwasher, lol.
I own a speedqueen. I love my speedqueen. I wouldn't buy speedqueen today and instead opt for a different, cheaper dumb model.
My speedqueen dryer needs a new control board after 9 years. A new dryer isn't as high quality. From what I understand the dryer quality dipped in the past 6-9 years whereas washers are more or less the same. Maytag and GE have much cheaper dumb options you should consider, and save yourself several hundred. It will also make replacement less painful if a critical part dies.
I don't trust Maytag and GE. It's good that they have simple interfaces and lack surveillance tech, but their cheap machines are almost certainly built for price-driven consumers who don't consider that they are built to fall apart.
Household appliances have been around for a long time now. I wish that there were open-source hardware designs that a certification organization could evaluate.
don't do it! i just got rid of my set i purchased new in 2020. i'd rather have a washer/dryer that i have to replace every 5 years than the terrible function of both the washer and dryer. the washer i'll forgive a little being it was the front loader model, but their door seal is a terrible design and pools water, just reeked of mold all the time. i'll forgive it because it's a common front loader issue. the dryer on the other hand had failed heating element in the first few months. whatever these things happen, however the heating element on that model gets too hot. it would melt the synthetic lint onto the screen as it passed out of the main dryer body, which after a couple months would form these plastic stalactites on the grill that i would have to grind off every two months, because they would start shredding my clothes.
Whenever I look at reviews for something, e.g. a restaurant, I always sort by worst and see what they say. If it's some dealbreaker like "I found a rat in my food", then I'm outta there. If it's "the service was slow this one time", I can live with it.
I don't pay any attention to the positive reviews at all, except just for the number of them.
yes, I’ve found a pretty reliable approach for apartments is if people are complaining about the fees in the 1 star reviews, it’s probably a pretty good apartment.
Other places have 1 star reviews mentioning mold, pests, break-ins, etc.
I use a similar approach for amazon reviews. If all the 1 star reviews are telling the same story then it’s bad. If there’s not much consistency then it’s probably fine. That and the percentage of 1 star reviews. generally I aim for <5%
Owners also have a lot more time to notice all of the stuff that's not quite right. The cars with touchscreens for example all have an absurd number of weird, sometimes very annoying, software bugs that come up in edge cases or only occur intermittently that you probably wouldn't notice if just taking a test drive.
Few car owners spend a lot of time thinking about the stuff their car didn't screw up or have a good basis for comparing those to a wide range of comparable vehicles.
Reviewers are also usually biased towards reviewing products that are good and/or interesting, and while that's also true of consumers, you'd expect reviewers to be more informed.
Probably part of it. A lot of reviewers get their units for free and it's easier to be happy with something you didn't pay for. We can't tell which reviews were sponsored, so we can't measure that directly.
One unfortunate thing is that Amazon blocked all reviews that said "In exchange for an honest and unbiased review, I received ..." which was a good marker of product crapitude. It makes sense for Amazon to do that since it makes them look better but as a user I wish it hadn't happened - because of AI I can now review all the crap reviews easily. It would have been good to have known.
I've been on Amazon's "get free stuff" list for a few years. I review stuff honestly.
If the product is trash, I review it as such.
If it's good, it gets some notes about the good stuff and the parts that make it less-than-great.
If it's great (and I'm rather particular so most things fall short of "great"), then it's still gone over in detail.
If my opinion changes over time, either positively or negatively, then: I update the review.
---
This is in-keeping with the program's terms of service, and nothing about those terms compels me to behave other-than-honestly. I'm not expecting to get kicked out of it anytime soon regardless of how many 1-star reviews I post.
Beyond that reviewers probably don't get as much time with the product so they're not likely to get the chance to see reliability issues. A new product isn't likely to break within a 1 month review period.
Yeah, the directives are leaking out into the results--just the problem, succinctly.
In a weird way, publishing these things is an entirely new low for disrespecting people over the internet. Back In My day, the author at least put some effort into insulting the audience, now it's just laziness.
Yeah well not many reviewers actually use them long enough before putting up a review - fair play, they review what they have on hand. Reviewers are mostly working a job too, the money boat is during a release of a product, not a year after they've well tinkered with it - assuming they even have the time to with multiple same-category products released constantly.
Anyway, all i'm saying is its not terrible. People who watch reviews on release should know there is no reliability to talk about unless the reviewer spends the effort to 'accelerate' these - e.g. Fold testing foldable phones and counting them.
Take a look at my country's (Singapore) arguably #1 e-commerce platform and you'll notice something even more mindblowing - platform-generated, ai-generated reviews. And no, its not the sellers, most of them have even voiced their frustrations that they dont even have an option to block these 'ai-generated reviews' on their products. Yes, there are ai-generated humans wearing ear0hones clipping through ears, on the complete opposite directions and telling you how awesome the product is. Truly dystopian.
Me too. I don’t know how that’s even possible though without bias and whatnot finding a way. Sometimes you find out at the same rate as the manufacturer. Hell, I typed this on my third iPhone 18 in last ~month, after never having a single iPhone hardware issue in almost 2 decades, Not even a dead battery, this version has been awful. First one had weak antenna, second USB port didn’t work, third TBD. The associates I’ve worked with say they’ve never seen a version rollout with so many issues.
But to reply to the headline, becuase it's impossible to predict reliability of something new, and it's not possible to evaluate reliability based on a single example, you need lots of data collected over long periods of time.
The only thing most reviewers can do is speculate based on the reputation of the designer/manufacturer, and an educated guess based on the object's architecture and materials.
Ridiculous argument. Reviewers' task is to evaluate new products to provide information to consumers in a timely fashion. There's a niche for 'long term reviews' but it's tiny by comparison, and mainly sought out by nerds who are unusually interested in that product category.
Most reviewers simply can't evaluate products over a sufficiently long term to make convincing judgements about reliability. Where the latter is important, it's better to consult a source like consumer Reports that specializes in that sort of longitudinal assessment at the price of narrow product focus and shallower review detail.
Rather than taking incompetence for granted, it’s because—as the article also says—motivations differ, and it’s difficult to judge factors like warranty handling or updates. And fundamentally, “reliability” is broad. That’s even more the case for combined hardware-software products. Ultimately, Reddit is basically where people with complaints go, and reviewers themselves have bias too, but consumer complaints also largely come from people whose products broke, so it’s difficult to judge.
But ultimately, for reviewers, what matters is that they “make a living through reviews,” so they have to say things that fit the fanboy tier they’re targeting.
The problem is that fanboys are generally people who buy more devices to begin with, so they also judge reliability based on the existing product lineup, and reviewers are largely the same. As a result, they can’t help but judge mainly by new features.
To be precise, “reliability” requires predicting the future, and that’s not easy. How would you know if your computer might break tomorrow? There are serious hinge issues with the iPhone Duo right now—how would people buying it have predicted that?
Prediction is basically break-even even when you’re right, and easy to criticize when you’re wrong, so it’s a hard attribute for reviewers to review.
How’s this even news? Most if not all youtubers are shills, paid shills, and they are not hiding it with sponsorship, and even the ones who say “i bought it with my own money so im honest” are rarely honest because they don’t want to upset the brand who can hurt them legally or preventing them from buying their stuff in the future, or the fans so means less subscribers. The rare good youtubers are usually the ones that you don’t know because YT never promoted their vids or the ones that post one vid a year or so.
I'm not sure it's possible to even give a reliability score for a new product.
The only way to do this would be to give reviewers the product a year before it's released. That's obviously not possible in the modern JIT product market economy
The reason I only buy old stuff and basically never a new product (unless it's a early adopter type thing) is so that I can get the community reliability score.
I've noticed that people seem to also have two working definitions of "reliability".
1. "This works as expected to without error or repair for longer than expected"
2. "This is easy and straightforward to repair, so when it breaks the halt in operations is only temporary"
I don't know why people seem to use #2 when it is obviously not the meaning of reliability, but some version of it almost inevitably brought up when discussing an unreliable technology that somebody still prefers to use over the reliable one.
This thinking infests everything from computing to cars.
"Sure my PC crashes all the time, but its a simple reboot and some configuration tweaks to get it back online, takes like 30 seconds"
"I love my car, the service from the repair shop is white glove whenever I bring it in. I'm usually in and out in the same day"
"My stand mixer is amazing, I only have to 3d print a replacement for the central gear every 10 or 11 loaves of bread and it's a 30 second swap out to get it working again"
"I love my new clothes dryer, the maintenance contract gets somebody in within 24 hours to get it back online"
To the point of the post, very few organizations track long-term reliability and repairs for products, even major expensive ones like cars and appliances. The segment of consumer who really cares about this stuff just isn't large enough to make it really viable to do so, and the segment of consumers who follow definition #2 undercut them anyways.
In a sense, the second category can include a reliable repair or mitigation process.
Examnples like service from the shop and a maintenance contract on a dryer are great examples of people mistaking convenience of it being fixed with reliability, which is your main point But in many cases if something can reliably be fixed by the owner in an acceptable amount of time, that is a form of reliability.
Reviewers have limited data with which to rate longer-term reliability. Nobody can blame them for not doing-the-impossible.
The actual friction point is the subtle divergence of expectations. "User review" is a psychologically powerful concept - an extension of the "my friend/neighbour told me this" trust elevation.
But paradoxically, in today's popular society the reach of any given user review is (quasi) proportional to the amount of commercial involvement driving the exposure. Providing the platform, its userbase, and incentivising the content creator by metric of popularity.
So, now we have entire (minor) demographics in the business of finding new things to review. Class-leading tool of amazing reliability already exists for 10 years and is the benchmark for enduring quality in the field? That is wonderful, but the career reviewer still needs to review 10 new good-bad-and-ugly ones each year. Several will get a positive overall verdict from the reviewer, and some followers who make their purchase choices based upon the latest opinion they've heard from a person-of-respect will go out and buy those ones.
A reviewer who ended every new review for several years with "..but overall, the industry consensus of the Old Trusty 2000 is still the wisest holistic choice" would not be terribly compatible with the evolved world of User Reviews that we have.
There's also the matter of "the Old Trusty" being a dying species. Seemingly every brand I heard of being reliable - Bosch, Milwaukee, Toyota, Sony, Victorinox, Michelin, Dyson, possibly more - has gone to shit in the recent decade.
Backblaze drive stats used to be very useful when purchasing consumer drive stats for my laptops, e.g. in 2015:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10387962
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q3-201...
For various reasons I don't consult Backblaze stats much nowadays, but I wish this kind of reliability and failure rate information were more available for other products, especially LED light bulbs.
Online reviews fall into two categories:
- I just received this product and tried it out. Here's what I like or dislike about it.
- I've been using this product for a while and have this big problem with it.
Set 1 will give you a decent set of opinions, but they won't be about reliability, because no one has had it for long enough.
Set 2 will be overwhelmingly negative, because people who are happy with a product aren't posting about it online long after they bought it.
I tried to make a "unicorn" review on AliExpress. IIRC you can only write a review in the first 30 or 90 days. Too bad because I was going to sell the praises of the thing.
What was the item?
Honestly, the first set is the replacement for department stores where you could go and experience the product for yourself. They try to solve the problem of the first impression you might get. For example, I have been in the market for an over-ear bluetooth headphone, and as a result started checking online reviews. There are a ton of audio review sites now that do lab acoustic testing, mic samples, write articles with details about dimensions, weight, build quality, materials used, head comfort, cup depth, clamping force, ANC performance, etc.
Extremely detailed and generally great testing. Though tbh, if you were in a department store with all the options in front of you, you would give them all a try and pick the one that you like the most. You can evaluate half of these variables for yourself in a moment by holding and trying it out. If you're an audiophile, then you would can have your music and give each a listen in the store and decide better than a curve graph.
I spent a ton of times reading all the reviews and narrowing down the options, but was still between 3 or 4. Ended up driving 45 minutes to the nearest bestbuy and they had a decent selection. It was amazing how quickly I eliminated options and ended up picking one I liked.
I learned this lesson with my Kia Telluride. Rave reviews, but it was a new model without years of data behind it.
At 70,000 miles very expensive parts began to break down like clockwork, like the very complicated alternator, and even small accidents racked up $10,000-$20,000 repair bills. Insurance paid for it, but the car was out of commission for a month each time.
I can’t fault the reviewers exactly, but I learned a lesson that there may be something to longer, proven designs that have been battle tested over millions of collective miles.
That is why Toyota is so popular in the US: They are extremely reliable.
(I personally don't drive them, but many of my family members love them.)
If you want to keep a new car 10+ years, they're generally a safe bet. Related: I had very little problems with my 2018 Tesla Model 3, but traded it in at 6.5 years because I needed a larger vehicle for my family.
Cars are different nowadays (hopefully even more reliable), but the '95 Toyota Camry that my parents bought new in 1995 or 1996 lasted until I was done using it in college in 2011. Then my dad sold it for a chunk of cash. The only thing wrong with it was that the roof paint was gone to shit from the Florida sun. You could probably paint it, redo the ceiling fabric, and run it for another 10 years. They sunk a fair amount into it over the years, but nothing catastrophic -- no powertrain issues, no "fixing this AC will cost more than the car" issues. In the six years I drove it I think it needed about $300 of work (something about the steering or suspension).
There are lots of Camry from 2008 to 2017 which has paint delamination issue. Ours is from 2012 but it only started getting noticeably worse near the end of the warranty period and I never heard about it because it was during the pandemic and our dealer went out of business. Toyota didn't publicize the issue till the end.
Family member had a rav4 prime instrument cluster go black. Spent 4+ months without that vehicle while they were trying to figure that shit out. No idea if this is common, but those cars aren't exactly readily available so they were stuck with a Corolla for a long time.
I think it depends on were you live. The roads in my country are high quality and the winters are soft. You'd actually have to try really hard to wreck any car in 10 years.
For second hand cars, here in Australia we have a youtuber that goes by the name ReDriven, this guy Adam reviews second hand cars specifically and focuses on reliability, and what it's like to live with. He's got a mate who's a mechanic that details all the specific mechanical problems that they see with the cars.
Such an insanely useful little channel and they do amazing work.
I think small accidents == large bills is caused by the amount of sensors and crumple zones in cars.
Layered on top of that is the massively increased cost of parts and labor to install the parts and paint them. And cars aren't really made to be taken apart easily.
Then there is the issue of availability of parts, especially in newer cars.
All of that makes it so that there are a 100+ cars outside the body-shop I frequently pass by. Because of the speed (or slowness) of the pipeline, body-shops need to be a certain size. Then insurance tries to squeeze them, and people don't get paid enough for the work they actually do.
So that's why your repaired bumper is 2 tints darker than your body. No-one has the time to properly blend the paints.
> And cars aren't really made to be taken apart easily.
This is a major contributor for specific models. I was listening to my brother complain about a vehicle that rolled into their shop lately and how the engineers really didn’t think about how difficult it would be for technicians to service things. Some parts are fairly inexpensive and easy to replace but you have to remove the engine or transmission in order to get enough clearance to swap out the part!
It's there even for parts that require regular replacement. For example, VW GTIs have required removing the bumper and taking a decent amount of stuff off the car in order to replace the headlights. This has been the case since at least 2007. Granted with LED headlights this isn't as much of an issue but prior generations had xenon headlights which required replacement periodically.
Same on my 14-year-old Honda van. The sane way to replace the HID bulbs (or the ballast or the ignitor, because HID things) is to remove the headlight housings, and the first step of doing that is removing the front bumper cover. It's not completely awful, but it's not exactly awesome either.
The less-sane way to replace just-the-bulb is from the top. It seems like it should be faster, and it sure does look easier, but it's a blind one-handed process with little fiddly bits to manipulate. There's not enough room to add a reasonably-stout glove to that hand, and there wouldn't be enough dexterity and tactile sense if there were. Consequently, there will be blood. I'm told that it's a lot more practical to swap a bulb in-situ with the halogen housings (as those don't have as much depth to them as the ones for HID), but my Honda is not so-endowed.
Part of this is because, AFAICT, the headlight assemblies are structural. They tie into several other assemblies and help hold the front of the vehicle together.
(A pedestrian Buick or Chevrolet from ~20 years ago is very different: To remove a headlight assembly, just lift up on a couple of heavy nylon straps and the whole shebang basically just falls out. It takes seconds. Reinstallation is very nearly as quick.)
That’s not a new thing.
I replaced the heater core on a 1987 Ford XF Falcon. In hindsight, it would’ve been easier to pull the motor out and cut myself an access panel in the firewall than it was to disassemble and reassemble the dash.
Certainly not new. Though the space under the hood remains fairly constant, the free space has decreased. There are more and more components becoming difficult to reach and service while they’re among the first to wear out.
One interesting thing I noticed about Chinese vehicles is that the expensive sensor arrays are commonly mounted on the roof, presumably safe from small fender benders. Hopefully Western manufacturers will pick up that feature.
Ideally that would be the place to keep them. It'd also help with not having to recalibrate the sensor arrays due to bumps that might not damage anything but which jostle things a bit. I think recalibration essentially requires an expensive visit to the dealer since the software needed to do it is dealer only or extremely expensive for independent mechanics.
If you're conservative and buying something as critical as a daily use car it makes a lot of sense to get second or later model year of the second or later generation since a major redesign. Preferably a model that has been sold in high volumes and used heavily as a taxi or something. Then at least you will know the most likely problems before you buy.
Last time I flew into O'hare it was incredible how it seemed like half the Ubers were Rav4s or Highlanders.
Either of those with the 2.5L hybrid drivetrain is about as boring of a car as you can get (in a good way).
I think reliability is the reason they killed the Soul. It scored too high a score on reliability for its price point.
Can’t be true of their brake lights. One of my hobbies is alerting people to burnt-out tail lights, and every time I see a Soul I pay particular attention to it, because at least 1 out of every 4 cars has a light or two out.
Or is that a reflection of Kia buyers...
That's not why. The Soul like other small cars (eg. Fit, Yaris, Accent) saw shrinking uptake from consumers.
People on HN love talking about small cars, but purchasing data has shown otherwise in most markets.
The Kia Soul was also heavy hit by tariffs on South Korean automotive exports in North America and the EU as well as the sanctions on Russia, as it was manufactured and assembled in Kia's Gwangju and Kaliningrad factories. Btw, the Russian factory now assembles Chinese cars for the Russian and Belarusian market.
The second generation Soul was Kia's best selling vehicle in the U.S., and for Honda the Fit was their third best seller behind the CR-V and Civic. The issue wasn't that people weren't buying them. They absolutely were. The issue was that dealer allocations kept getting lower and lower as the manufacturers pushed CUVs and SUVs more and more after 2006. 2008 delayed that shift since big SUVs were seen as icons of the crash, but by 2011 the shift resumed. CAFE standards made it infeasible to sell the smaller cars because their development and testing was more expensive thanks to the footprint rule. Since the U.S. was the second largest market behind China and China was already overcrowded in the A and B segments, the moment that the U.S. stopped being enough of a profit center (around 2014) those segments got axed. When they deemed it too narrow in profits for the C segment (around 2018) that also got axed. Honda and Toyota are the only holdouts with the Civic and Corolla because Europe and Asia love the things, and while those two markets are only 30% of the size of the U.S. in terms of sales per year that's still big enough to justify keeping it around. Especially as the Civic now has no competition except the Corolla in the U.S. since Ford, GM, Stellantis, Nissan, Hyundai, Geely, and Tata all abandoned hatchbacks, coupes, and sedans. It's all down to loopholes and perverse incentives betraying the buying public once again.
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It’s not quite a full long term review, but I always liked when car mags did the “live with it for 3 months” section across a load of people. Average reviews don’t have that behind them typically.
I could take my car from the dealer and drive it for 30 minutes and learn not a lot. I could live with it for a month, and learn that it doesn’t make the wagon cover go back and forth automatically like the old one, the infotainment restarts twice as often, I can’t have X and Y visible at the same time in the digital dash, the armrest is a bit of a pain to reposition up and down if there’s a coffee in the holder, the coins rattle in the coin bin…
The “I’ve had this a year” review is always a lot more helpful.
Can’t believe nobody has figured out how to monetize honest in-depth reviews of everything (restaurants, electronics, etc.)
Think of the billions wasted on inferior/sub-par/non-leading products and experiences, and the happiness opportunity cost.
I think it's a scale issue. A small group or individual can build up a trusted source of reviews, but the brand is worth a lot compared to people who are selling things, compared to the direct revenue from people who are buying.
So the incentive to sell is way more than people will pay for the reviews.
Combine that with a timing problem, a review at one year is pointless to new car buyers, since the new model is a bit different.
I worked at a company that tried that 15 years ago. The problem is that the incentives for such businesses is perverse. It’s basically impossible to avoid people trashing a competitor’s product to promote their own, paid reviews, taking fees from manufacturers for making good reviews more visible for them (gotta pay the bills), all sorts of things that eventually makes your business unreliable just like all others.
There's the Michelin star thing, not sure if / how they monetize it but it's not making them any poorer. And there's some consumer organizations like (in the Netherlands) the Consumentenbond which has subscribers, but it's a bit more like a union than a review company.
Michelin makes tires, they originally made the star system to get people to drive to these places, thereby using up their tires.
Choice does a pretty good job, and is pretty in-depth.
I'm about to buy a Speed Queen TR7 washing machine. It feels great to buy a dumb appliance that's built to last and serviceable.
No spyware and featuritis a la kings of user-hostilility LG and Samsung.
No planned obsolescence from built-to-disintegrate brands living off ancient reputations like Whirlpool and Maytag.
Just a machine that I won't have to worry about from a company that makes money by providing value rather than by victimizing their customers.
Happy fellow TR7 owner here, though I am curious if Whirlpool’s latest foray into seemingly reliable washers will pose any real threat/competition. The TR7 is definitely one that “just works” and fades into the background of your life.
Sadly Bosch didn’t take the same tack; the prospect of slurping up all that sweet, sweet data must have been too hard to resist. I love my 800 series dishwasher but I do wish it were as “dumb” as the TR7.
Who can tell which Whirlpool appliances are actually quality? It's so hard to trust anybody. Between the short-time-horizon thinking of public companies driven by the share price and the brand cannibalism of Private Equity, the brand you thought was reliable a couple years ago is today dialing up short-term gains so that its current leadership can gut the company and retire.
Reviews are so easily gamed that it's hard to trust them. Only companies with small product lines can build and maintain a durable reputation for quality.
I like my Bosch dishwasher, too. Never connected it to wifi; never downloaded the app. It broadcasts a Bluetooth channel I wish I could turn off, but I've not seen any other ill effect. There's just no compelling use-case for a "connected" dishwasher, lol.
Time to exploit their outdated, unpatched bluetooth stack and do some dishwasher wardriving ;)
Maybe their built-in speaker hardware can be reconfigured to act as a microphone.
I own a speedqueen. I love my speedqueen. I wouldn't buy speedqueen today and instead opt for a different, cheaper dumb model.
My speedqueen dryer needs a new control board after 9 years. A new dryer isn't as high quality. From what I understand the dryer quality dipped in the past 6-9 years whereas washers are more or less the same. Maytag and GE have much cheaper dumb options you should consider, and save yourself several hundred. It will also make replacement less painful if a critical part dies.
I don't trust Maytag and GE. It's good that they have simple interfaces and lack surveillance tech, but their cheap machines are almost certainly built for price-driven consumers who don't consider that they are built to fall apart.
Household appliances have been around for a long time now. I wish that there were open-source hardware designs that a certification organization could evaluate.
don't do it! i just got rid of my set i purchased new in 2020. i'd rather have a washer/dryer that i have to replace every 5 years than the terrible function of both the washer and dryer. the washer i'll forgive a little being it was the front loader model, but their door seal is a terrible design and pools water, just reeked of mold all the time. i'll forgive it because it's a common front loader issue. the dryer on the other hand had failed heating element in the first few months. whatever these things happen, however the heating element on that model gets too hot. it would melt the synthetic lint onto the screen as it passed out of the main dryer body, which after a couple months would form these plastic stalactites on the grill that i would have to grind off every two months, because they would start shredding my clothes.
here's someone else with the same problem: https://www.reddit.com/r/Appliances/comments/10ijvmy/why_is_...
I don’t know you can’t adjust the water level so I’m afraid that sensor is gonna break..
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tangentially related: I’ve been apartment hunting recently and it reminds me of a common occurrence for apartment reviews:
5 star reviews are all: “I did the tour and the agent was friendly/place looked nice”
meanwhile the 1 star reviews: “I actually live here and this place is terrible.”
no doubt they ask you to review 5 stars on the tour…
Many places I toured offered $5 starbucks gift-cards for a review.
Whenever I look at reviews for something, e.g. a restaurant, I always sort by worst and see what they say. If it's some dealbreaker like "I found a rat in my food", then I'm outta there. If it's "the service was slow this one time", I can live with it.
I don't pay any attention to the positive reviews at all, except just for the number of them.
yes, I’ve found a pretty reliable approach for apartments is if people are complaining about the fees in the 1 star reviews, it’s probably a pretty good apartment.
Other places have 1 star reviews mentioning mold, pests, break-ins, etc.
I use a similar approach for amazon reviews. If all the 1 star reviews are telling the same story then it’s bad. If there’s not much consistency then it’s probably fine. That and the percentage of 1 star reviews. generally I aim for <5%
True. One more thing we just found out: only about 15% of what reviewers say is negative, compare to 56% for owners.
>"reviewers say is negative, compare to 56% for owners"
This is likely a misleading statistic, as dissatisfied owners are more likely to write and submit reviews than satisfied users.
Owners also have a lot more time to notice all of the stuff that's not quite right. The cars with touchscreens for example all have an absurd number of weird, sometimes very annoying, software bugs that come up in edge cases or only occur intermittently that you probably wouldn't notice if just taking a test drive.
Few car owners spend a lot of time thinking about the stuff their car didn't screw up or have a good basis for comparing those to a wide range of comparable vehicles.
Reviewers are also usually biased towards reviewing products that are good and/or interesting, and while that's also true of consumers, you'd expect reviewers to be more informed.
Familiarity breeds contempt?
Is this like Amazon where the reviewers are basically on a “get free stuff” list, and they are no longer selected once they leave a negative review?’
Probably part of it. A lot of reviewers get their units for free and it's easier to be happy with something you didn't pay for. We can't tell which reviews were sponsored, so we can't measure that directly.
One unfortunate thing is that Amazon blocked all reviews that said "In exchange for an honest and unbiased review, I received ..." which was a good marker of product crapitude. It makes sense for Amazon to do that since it makes them look better but as a user I wish it hadn't happened - because of AI I can now review all the crap reviews easily. It would have been good to have known.
“Sponsored” is an interesting word to use
I've been on Amazon's "get free stuff" list for a few years. I review stuff honestly.
If the product is trash, I review it as such.
If it's good, it gets some notes about the good stuff and the parts that make it less-than-great.
If it's great (and I'm rather particular so most things fall short of "great"), then it's still gone over in detail.
If my opinion changes over time, either positively or negatively, then: I update the review.
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This is in-keeping with the program's terms of service, and nothing about those terms compels me to behave other-than-honestly. I'm not expecting to get kicked out of it anytime soon regardless of how many 1-star reviews I post.
Beyond that reviewers probably don't get as much time with the product so they're not likely to get the chance to see reliability issues. A new product isn't likely to break within a 1 month review period.
Can somebody explain "share of each sides opinions" as a statistic? Why am I solving a riddle to read an article?
The title is a clear Claude-ism, I had low hopes after noticing it. The title should be one thing a human writes, if nothing else
Yeah, the directives are leaking out into the results--just the problem, succinctly.
In a weird way, publishing these things is an entirely new low for disrespecting people over the internet. Back In My day, the author at least put some effort into insulting the audience, now it's just laziness.
What % of all opinions of a given group are opinions about reliability, durability etc
rarely * 2 ≈ still rarely?
Yeah well not many reviewers actually use them long enough before putting up a review - fair play, they review what they have on hand. Reviewers are mostly working a job too, the money boat is during a release of a product, not a year after they've well tinkered with it - assuming they even have the time to with multiple same-category products released constantly.
Anyway, all i'm saying is its not terrible. People who watch reviews on release should know there is no reliability to talk about unless the reviewer spends the effort to 'accelerate' these - e.g. Fold testing foldable phones and counting them.
Take a look at my country's (Singapore) arguably #1 e-commerce platform and you'll notice something even more mindblowing - platform-generated, ai-generated reviews. And no, its not the sellers, most of them have even voiced their frustrations that they dont even have an option to block these 'ai-generated reviews' on their products. Yes, there are ai-generated humans wearing ear0hones clipping through ears, on the complete opposite directions and telling you how awesome the product is. Truly dystopian.
This lovely AI generated video from said platform showing how (not) to use earbuds went viral a while back:
https://www.reddit.com/r/singapore/comments/1wn9cz5/the_stan...
I would really love to know a reliable way to determine if a product is a reliable before buying.
Me too. I don’t know how that’s even possible though without bias and whatnot finding a way. Sometimes you find out at the same rate as the manufacturer. Hell, I typed this on my third iPhone 18 in last ~month, after never having a single iPhone hardware issue in almost 2 decades, Not even a dead battery, this version has been awful. First one had weak antenna, second USB port didn’t work, third TBD. The associates I’ve worked with say they’ve never seen a version rollout with so many issues.
The most useless review is the one where I am asked to review something on the day it is delivered.
Why is this news? Who didn't realize
> Most of what breaks shows up after the review is done
owners who face reliability issues are more likely to post. This could be reverse "survivor bias."
Here was me thinking this was about code ownership ;)
article is complete unreadable slop.
But to reply to the headline, becuase it's impossible to predict reliability of something new, and it's not possible to evaluate reliability based on a single example, you need lots of data collected over long periods of time.
The only thing most reviewers can do is speculate based on the reputation of the designer/manufacturer, and an educated guess based on the object's architecture and materials.
This is just reverse survivorship bias.
Because reviewers don’t use things for long, while owners usually do. So reviewers generally tend to fixate on new features by default.
Which is why the long-term reviews make much more sense.
The car reviewer needs to get over the honeymoon phase of this new shiny gadget.
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Ridiculous argument. Reviewers' task is to evaluate new products to provide information to consumers in a timely fashion. There's a niche for 'long term reviews' but it's tiny by comparison, and mainly sought out by nerds who are unusually interested in that product category.
Most reviewers simply can't evaluate products over a sufficiently long term to make convincing judgements about reliability. Where the latter is important, it's better to consult a source like consumer Reports that specializes in that sort of longitudinal assessment at the price of narrow product focus and shallower review detail.
I understand your point but I can't expect a single sample review for a new product to contain anything useful in regards to reliability.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Lol. Fair, though most reviewers only get a unit for a few weeks.
Rather than taking incompetence for granted, it’s because—as the article also says—motivations differ, and it’s difficult to judge factors like warranty handling or updates. And fundamentally, “reliability” is broad. That’s even more the case for combined hardware-software products. Ultimately, Reddit is basically where people with complaints go, and reviewers themselves have bias too, but consumer complaints also largely come from people whose products broke, so it’s difficult to judge.
But ultimately, for reviewers, what matters is that they “make a living through reviews,” so they have to say things that fit the fanboy tier they’re targeting.
The problem is that fanboys are generally people who buy more devices to begin with, so they also judge reliability based on the existing product lineup, and reviewers are largely the same. As a result, they can’t help but judge mainly by new features.
To be precise, “reliability” requires predicting the future, and that’s not easy. How would you know if your computer might break tomorrow? There are serious hinge issues with the iPhone Duo right now—how would people buying it have predicted that?
Prediction is basically break-even even when you’re right, and easy to criticize when you’re wrong, so it’s a hard attribute for reviewers to review.
How’s this even news? Most if not all youtubers are shills, paid shills, and they are not hiding it with sponsorship, and even the ones who say “i bought it with my own money so im honest” are rarely honest because they don’t want to upset the brand who can hurt them legally or preventing them from buying their stuff in the future, or the fans so means less subscribers. The rare good youtubers are usually the ones that you don’t know because YT never promoted their vids or the ones that post one vid a year or so.
Long term review content is always so good but it’s rare so it’s expensive and people skip to the conclusion.
I'm not sure it's possible to even give a reliability score for a new product.
The only way to do this would be to give reviewers the product a year before it's released. That's obviously not possible in the modern JIT product market economy
The reason I only buy old stuff and basically never a new product (unless it's a early adopter type thing) is so that I can get the community reliability score.
Never pay to be a new product tester
> .bs-consent__sheet { … }
Couldn't have said it better myself
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I've noticed that people seem to also have two working definitions of "reliability".
1. "This works as expected to without error or repair for longer than expected"
2. "This is easy and straightforward to repair, so when it breaks the halt in operations is only temporary"
I don't know why people seem to use #2 when it is obviously not the meaning of reliability, but some version of it almost inevitably brought up when discussing an unreliable technology that somebody still prefers to use over the reliable one.
This thinking infests everything from computing to cars.
"Sure my PC crashes all the time, but its a simple reboot and some configuration tweaks to get it back online, takes like 30 seconds"
"I love my car, the service from the repair shop is white glove whenever I bring it in. I'm usually in and out in the same day"
"My stand mixer is amazing, I only have to 3d print a replacement for the central gear every 10 or 11 loaves of bread and it's a 30 second swap out to get it working again"
"I love my new clothes dryer, the maintenance contract gets somebody in within 24 hours to get it back online"
To the point of the post, very few organizations track long-term reliability and repairs for products, even major expensive ones like cars and appliances. The segment of consumer who really cares about this stuff just isn't large enough to make it really viable to do so, and the segment of consumers who follow definition #2 undercut them anyways.
In a sense, the second category can include a reliable repair or mitigation process.
Examnples like service from the shop and a maintenance contract on a dryer are great examples of people mistaking convenience of it being fixed with reliability, which is your main point But in many cases if something can reliably be fixed by the owner in an acceptable amount of time, that is a form of reliability.