The problem with phones is the chipset software support. You can make the most repairable phone but when they both get the same length of support it helps less.
That's certainly the case. The problem is the legal and social framework hasn't caught up with the times. It wasn't that long ago that the government was small enough to be funded entirely by tariffs. Everything has been outsourced but it's still treated as not a government action so we get all sorts of nasty things like unaccountable private prisons.
I've thought about this and there's no way to condense a multivariate notion of product quality into a scale. The best I've come up with is that all products should have to prominently advertise their years of warranty support. This creates an incentive for products to last longer than the warranty and makes comparison shopping easy.
>Once a car gets older, there's usually no shortage of the electrical components on the secondary market as they're getting scrapped
Usually the lifespan limiting component is the same on all vehicles of a type so there's a shortage of exactly the part you need which makes it economically nonviable.
>figures out "Capacitor 96 goes bad on Part 420" and solders a new one in.
Car PCB's are often conformally coated or require destructive disassembly.
>We'll run into problems once they "marry" all the electric parts
There are a lot of reasons, many of them bureaucratic.
If you own your own home in an urban locale with a garage and drive more than 12k miles a year an EV is probably perfect for you. If you live in a condo good luck dealing with the condo board to install a charger. If you park on the street tough luck charging. If you don't drive enough gas is cheaper. If you drive too much you will spend too much time charging.
The problem is that the number of people that fit in this category isn't that big. The market may be saturating.
The other issue is modern cars generally. The average age of a car on the road is going up because modern cars are too complicated and too expensive.
A large reason for this is IP laws. I can still buy parts for my 90's car because the aftermarket still supports it. Modern car parts are full of computers and the aftermarket will never support them because they can't ship copyrighted code. After 10 years they will be scrapped because there will be no parts available. We will end up with a bimodal car market. 90's cars and cars <10 years old with nothing in between.
Everything in a car used to be covered by patents but they mostly expired in the 70's. Now it's copyright which will outlive us all.