> USSR products often breathed a design language much closer to modularity, maintainability and repairability.

I think it’s just any old products are less intricate thus more repairable.

E.g. Nokia phones are more repairable than iPhones. Older laptops are more repairable/upgradable than say latest XPS or a MacBook where everything is soldered on. 195x Ford Mustang is more repairable than a new one full of electronics.

Hopefully, brands like Fairphone and Framework have some level of impact in the industry. I have decided to never buy a conventional phone or laptop again that is not modular and repairable like this, as long as brands like these exist.

> I think it’s just any old products are less intricate thus more repairable.

Often so indeed. I suspect it was not just old products though, but also something to do with a different alignment of incentives.

Why would a Soviet car have used DRM for example?

> I would love to see an affordable, simple, modular, maintainable, repairable electric car. One can dream...

I applaud the dream, of course. As someone mentioned, pretty much all older vehicles were infinitely more repairable than current designs, so, no USSR tech required. For the first ten or twelve years of my driving history I bought used cars with at least 80K miles (128 K km) in the odometer. This means I spent my weekends and some evenings under the hood or under the car. This is to say, I get it.

The problem with electrics is that they are very far from "grease monkey" territory. When one starts dealing with high voltages and high current discharge capability, one very quickly leaves the domain of what the average person can and should be able to touch. In fact, lots of EE's lack the experience to safely deal with such devices.

The good news is that they are much simpler (in the sense of the modules that make-up a vehicle) than the internal combustion version. First order repairs should take the form of changing modules. The factory can then deal with component level repair (think: motor controller).

An electronics tech can repair a random failed motor controller. That information should absolutely not be limited to just factory. When I fix cars, most of the time I have to fix broken wires and faulty ground. Occasionally, I have to fix a failed component in the ECU. They are extremely easy to work on for someone skilled at microsoldering, which is not a hard skill to attain.

It isn't about being able to solder components. It's about just how dangerous it is to work on high power circuits. High voltage makes it even worse. And then, you need specialized test equipment and fixtures.

Source: I used to own a company where we designed manufactured high power DC brush and brushless motor controllers. As a simple example, every motor controller had to be tested for short circuit protection under full load. The power supplies alone were outside the realm of anything normal. The motor controller, power supply and storage capacitors had to be in a custom explosion-proof enclosure for the test.

The reason they were repairable and maintainable was because they shit products and were nightmarishly unreliable. One could not simply own a car and drive it, you had to be an amateur mechanic to be able to drive one. And let's not forget that they were also very very expensive and few could afford.

This is true of cars, but OP talked about "products" in general. And many Soviet products were extremely reliable (but shit for other reasons, like horrible UX).

Not in my experience. Electronics, even though most were clones of Western/Asian designs, suffered from faulty components (leaking caps, disintegrating PCBs) and faulty soldering, misplaced wires, broken insulation etc. And the mechanical things had all kinds of issues from the broken tolerances and faulty materials to the braindead designs that would just destroy themselves unless hacked around.

Even in the 1990s, when the soviet cars had been freely available, a lightly used Lada (Jiguli in its own country) costed more than a brand new one since it's been proven to work more or less reliably and the first owner had addressed the most serious issues already.

I remember a vacuum cleaner we used to have. It looked like some kind of military gadget, all metal and heavy. But it worked for over 10 years.

>and few could afford.

and if they could afford it there was a looooong waiting list. it was my parent's turn to get their landline phone connected in 2013 ... sadly communist poland collapsed before that and they have to live with smartphones instead.

Chevy's Bolt is pretty simple and easily maintained/repaired.

Chevy was actually selling the $35k car Musk wouldn't fucking shut up about - the base Model 3, which never existed except on paper.

Now you can have your choice of Bolts in the mid teens, and they've now got eight year warranty on the batteries (eight years from this year, when the battery recall was performed.)

Teslas seem modular/maintainable if you have the expertise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPHea6GdQYw

You don't need expertise, you also need proprietary software.

And to have a VIN number they haven't blacklisted, because their parts hotline will demand your VIN before they'll even start talking to you, and stop talking to you if they don't like your VIN.

There's also the small matter of just being able to get parts, period. Tesla parts availability is terrible because they're under such a production crush. People go months for body repairs, and the prices for the parts are sit-down-first levels.