Complication

Complication

My first car was a 1971 Ford Torino. It had two keys – one for the ignition and one for the doors. The keys, when I got the car in 1987, were already 16 years old, and functioned perfectly. The ignition key had a square head, and the door key a round one, so they were instantly indistinguishable in the dark, by feel. I could go to any hardware store and have a duplicate made in minutes for about the cost of a McDonald’s hamburger.

I am the owner right now of a 2001 Ford Ranger. It’s beat to hell, but I use it to haul mulch, take things to the dump, and scoring marketplace finds. It only has one key for both the door and the ignition, which I see as a logical improvement on the old system. The key on my keychain is the original key, currently 24 years old, and it works perfectly. It can be duplicated at any hardware store in minutes for the cost of a McDonald’s hamburger.

My wife’s car is a 2018 Hyundai Tucson. We bought it used, and it came with exactly one key, which has a computer device in it that prohibits anyone other than Hyundai from duplicating it, at a cost of hundreds of dollars. I spent hours researching and found a hardware store that could order the key blank, and then program the key, but Hyundai would not give them the codes to do it. Even the blank was more than $100.

This does not feel like progress to me.

When I owned the Torino, I dropped my keys in a swimming pool once at a party (it was that kind of party – it was the eighties, man). After fishing them out, I dried them off roughly with a towel and then drove home.

That would have destroyed the keys to the Tucson.

I now have a much more complicated thing than the old thing. It’s more fragile, has batteries that need replaced periodically, and because the key contains both mechanical and electrical functions, it will eventually fail. It can be damaged by water, by heat, or by impact. Duplication cost is easily 100 times what the old system would have cost to duplicate.

To replace the ignition switch on the Torino, I could have ordered the part through my local parts store and installed it myself in an afternoon with a relatively minimal toolkit. The Tucson would require, among other things, a computer and proprietary programs.

The new system is worse in literally every way, except one. Fans of the new system would say that yes, all of this is true, but I gained a panic switch and the ability to unlock my car doors remotely. This is a marginal benefit, to be sure, but I question if this benefit is truly worth the cost, and could surely have been accomplished by  other means – for instance, having a key fob as an upgrade that contained those functions.

By now, you are no doubt tired of hearing me prattle on about my keys, and wish I would get to the point. And the point is this – things are being needlessly complicated in the name of “progress”.

As another example: we live in a place where the power goes out often. Our infrastructure is fragile here. Part of our resiliency plan involves having redundancy built into the system – so, for example, when our power went out last winter, we still had a gas fireplace to keep us warm.

We are currently renovating our kitchen, and looked for ages for a simple gas range with mechanical controls. These are user-repairable, use 100-year-old technology and should last a lifetime. I grew up eating food cooked on these sorts of stoves. They existed. They should be easy to manufacture.

The starting point for these stoves is around $2,000, and the “good” ones are closer to $4,000. I can buy a better (in terms of specs) stove with digital all sorts of things for $800. According to the reviews, they will last about 8 years and are unrepairable.

In the end, we bought a relatively affordable stove that hits all my buttons, except it has digital controls for the oven, and according to the reviews, if you use the self-cleaning oven feature, it will melt the motherboard. It was either that or get the one that had Bluetooth, and I refuse to own a stove that can talk to anyone.

I’m already saving for the next, lifetime stove, after we send this one to the landfill in a few years.

This stove is not an improvement on existing stoves in any way. It does everything the stove we had in our kitchen in 1984 did, with the addition of a digital clock and timer, and in exchange we got a motherboard, lack of user serviceability, and planned obsolescence.

But it is not at all easy for a company to make billions of dollars by making affordable goods that a reasonably handy person can repair, and that with care will last decades. These companies have shareholders who demand ever-increasing profit margins, and so a thing – like my truck keys – which reached its design and usability peak as an analog device and will last at least 24 years with no care at all is now replaced with a vastly more complicated and expensive machine.