Right to Repair: Not Right for Everyone?

As I start my car to go to a xmas party, I receive this ominous error message on my dashboard…

“What is it now you over engineered, overpriced piece of German steel?” I muttered to myself. I’ve had error messages from signal lights not working; all the way to an engine misfire over the years. What I’ve learned is that the scarier the message, the more expensive the repair cost. This one sounded like one of those expensive error messages. A blindspot assist sensor, sounds important. I quickly look to my left then to my right; and to my horror this is what I see…

That’s right. Some crazy person thought it was a good idea to take my side mirror! Gad “I LOVE NEW YORK!!!”. As someone who’s lived in New York city long enough, I know they came up with that marketing slogan for this exact reason. Real New Yorkers don’t say that because they have fond, warm and fuzzy feelings about New York. They say it because you have to be slightly insane to actually want to live here. You need to say it to explain to yourself why you pay exorbitant rent to live in a shoebox sized apartment, have indifferent or overly friendly neighbors, have high petty crime rates and other conflagrations that will make most people in their sane mind ask “why?!”. In my head that slogan is read with a tone of aggressive exasperation.

Say it with an aggressive and exasperated tone (Brooklyn accent not required)

I go down and check the damage. I see that the thieving bastards made my life difficult by cutting all the wires from the side mirror. I later learned that if they had just unclipped it from the connectors this would have been a 5 minute repair job! They didn’t even have the decency to steal my side mirror glass properly! Obviously this was done by an amateur 😤

After the anger and denial comes the begging; I call my Mercedes-Benz dealership service center and ask them for an estimate. I wanted to think this wasn’t such a difficult repair considering that only the side mirror glass was missing. I tested the pan-tilt motors and it was still working fine. The side mirror motor assembly would still fold automatically and I didn’t see anything broken or missing on the side mirror housing. So really the only thing to be done is to replace the missing side mirror glass and re-wire the clipped wires. I looked up prices from their website for the missing part and it was around $100. Not bad I tell myself. Just replace the part and splice some wires together.

Armed with this knowledge I call up the Mercedes-Benz service center and explain my situation. To my shock they tell me that it will cost close to $2000 just for the parts!!! I’m like, what?! 2 grand to replace a pieace of glass and splice some wires back together?! And this is where I tell them they’re a bunch of price gouging pirates and slam the phone on them. Funny how you can’t really slam phones on people anymore. The best you can do is a really intense press of the end call 😂. Well if I’m being honest, I actually thanked the guy and politely said goodbye then carefully ended the call. Then imagined all of those things I just said earlier 🤣.

More than the cost of the repair, what really upset me was how they explained to me that they needed to replace the entire post mechanism of the side mirror because the wires were clipped. That itself was a $1000 part. The actual side mirror glass was another $200 and labor for the rest of it. What has the world come to when we need to replace perfectly working parts because we can’t splice some wires and solder them together again? I understand that most people wont have the skill or desire to do this themselves but to have a bonafide service center of a well known brand car tell you they can’t do it and need to just replace everything is just disgusting.

What has the world come to when we need to replace perfectly working parts because we can’t splice some wires and solder them together again?
Tito Mad Computer Scientist

There’s this guy I regularly watch on social media named TronicsFix. He’s an electronics repair guy by trade and documents his repairs on cam. He also explains in very simple words exactly what he is doing and how he does basic electronics troubleshooting. I personally am not an electronics engineer. My electronics knowledge is based on the amount of broken devices I’ve hoarded over the years and tinkered with. I have a basic understanding of it but not enough to be able to determine exactly what is wrong with a dead board. TronicsFix is not a tutorial channel. He doesn’t teach you how to be an electronics repair guy but he does educate you enough while keeping you entertained. More than the edutainment value though, I love watching this guy because of his mantra. He became an electronics repair guy because he hated seeing things being thrown away. In our culture of fast everything, that $1000 smartphone you own has an average life span of 2 years. Less if you are one of those who really needs to get the latest and greatest every release cycle. You will be surprised as to how many teens right now don’t even know how to use a screw driver. This is after my generation that is now afraid to open any electronic device to try and fix it or just be curious enough to see what’s inside. TronicsFix believes that every electronics device he fixes means one less thing that goes into the dump.

I call this repair a success. That’s one less thing that’s going to the trash today.
TronicsFix

Apple, the company that is afraid you might hurt yourself trying to repair your own device, recently started a self service repair program (https://www.selfservicerepair.com/home). And no, they did not do it for altruistic reasons. They we’re forced by decades of public pressure and government scrutiny. Multiple people on the internet has reviewed the self-repair process and they have one thing they all agree on; it’s easier to have Apple fix it.

https://www.macrumors.com/2022/05/04/apple-self-repair-program-hands-on/

Does this realization mean that Apple was right all along to keep everyone else away from being able to reasonably repair their own devices? I don’t think so. Self-repair might not be right for everyone but the ability to be able to do so means that corporations like Apple and John Deere will be kept honest in building products that do not have planned obsolescence built into their design.

Self-repair might not be right for everyone but the ability to be able to do so means that corporations like Apple and John Deere will be kept honest in building products that do not have planned obsolescence built into their design.
Mad Computer Scientist Ninja

Armed with the knowledge that my Mercedes-Benz service center will charge me an arm and a leg (and probably some other important internal organ), I decided to repair this missing side mirror myself. “How difficult can it be?”. Famous last words by someone about to do a DIY repair out on the streets of New York city in the dead of winter.

I assess the damage and it does seem that the only piece missing is a side mirror glass. Along with the cut lead wires from the side mirror post that was attached to the glass. I figured out that the wires were for the glass heating element and some signal wires for the blind spot assist LED light. Luckily nothing complicated about the electronics on these parts.

I also needed to pick up a couple of parts that I would be using for the repair. I found this no soldering iron required connector that lets you solder together 2 wires using just a lighter. Considering that I would be doing this repair out on the street, in the dead of winter, I thought this would be really handy. I also picked up a bunch of snap on connectors that had leads that would make it easier to connect the wires from the side mirror glass to the side mirror housing.

You would think that the Germans would make it easy for me by using a generic non-proprietary connector? NEIN! Oh well, a bit of minor wiring surgery can’t be that bad (again not considering I need to do this out in the dead of winter in the mean streets of New York city! 😂)

After cutting off the connector that came from the glass because i wont be able to use that connector end anyway, I proceed to wiring it directly to the side mirror housing post. I had to get right in the nooks and cranny of the housing just to splice those wires to connect to. This is because that amateur that stole my side mirror didnt bother to steal that proprietary connector cable properly and had cut it too deep into the housing. Thanks again for doing a bad job horrible person! 🤬

Anyways, I get the thing wired up and tested. That proprietary wire actually controls the LED light of the blind spot check system. Glad to see its showing yellow and red as expected.