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France introduces a law mandating 12 year support for products

I wonder if such laws will have a benefit for the consumer if introduced only in a single country and not EU wide since a company can always decide to not sell their products in a certain country if they don’t like the law there. Earlier this year you couldn’t buy an Oculus Quest from German dealers for some months because using it requires a fakebook account which some court decided is against German data privacy laws. You could of course always legally mail-order it from any other EU country. So unless these warranty laws can be enforcement in the country of the seller I don’t think there is much gained.

EDQH, Germany

The builder has to buy insurance at the time of sale, and it’s the insurance that pays even if the builder is bankrupt/dead/in jail. We had serious remedial work on our house in France at the time a long while after it was built.

You were lucky. IME, the insurance company is a fake one which the builder (or whoever) set up. And it is difficult to draft a law enforcing how long the insurer has to remain in business.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Here, artisans (they are.vey few general builders in France) must belong to URSAAF or one of the other trade type bodies and usually the Chamber of Commerce.
The body collects your health and pension payments etc and insurance. It then puts these off to a state approved and regulated insurance body. This is usually a big well funded body, often a mutual equivalent in size to some of the larger building societies in the UK or a.larfe insurance company
If you are having large building work done, it is advisable to check the insurance and that the “artisan” has all the correct diplomas beforehand. These will often be listed on the estimate which has to be signed as “read and approved before any work begins.”

France

The difference is that the building trade is a known quantity to the insurers, over centuries.

This kind of “product repair liability” is hard to quantify because e.g. how can one know 12 years ahead which product won’t be repairable due to some component non-availability factor. General product liability is anyway slightly tricky but in general it is available, and the need for it depends on what you are making (something which is mains powered is obviously a harder case, etc). This one, I would be amazed if an insurer would touch it with a 20m bargepole.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Its the law,s( consumer protection).
You don’t have to use it. No one is forcing you to buy one particular product over another.
If you are happy to throw something away just after the guarantee has run out, that is an option you have.
Personally I’m well p**sed off with the amount of unrepairable printers of different makes I’ve had to throw away after a year or 2 and just after I’ve bought another rip off set of ink cartridges which wont fit the next model along.
And how about phone chargers (at least the EU are doing something about that).
The answer is if a manufacturer doesn’t want to comply with the law, don’t market it in France. Simps.

France

Those are special cases though. Inkjet printers used to be say 250 quid and the cartridges were cheap. Then the market moved to the printers being 50 quid and the cartridges being coded and expensive, and at 50 quid the printer would not be worth repairing.

Any mandatory-repairability scheme would require the product to sell at a reasonably meaningful price otherwise the numbers will never add up.

The phone charger stuff is also unrelated. Yes it is good that it was sorted (the threat of the EU forcing it, or the market simply moving to the common connector which back then was micro-USB for everything non-Apple; now it is USB-C, with Apple doing its own thing) but again I don’t see a connection with repairability. Also I think a lot of charging is going wireless. Except in an aircraft where you don’t want the radiation

Also there will have to be limits on applicability. There are products where a 12 year repairability will not be viable. I’d say most of the consumer IT sector will be there.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

You buy a printer for €60 it comes with inks, sometimes just enough to do the test.
So you spend another €60 for a ser of inks.
The printer has cost you €120.
The amount of ink in each cartridge varies, many printers will not run on eco brand inks or aloow refills. So after a year th printer goes wrong, and cannot be repaired. They rely on people saying oh it only cost €60 we"ll just chuck it and get a new one. But many people have inks in the printer may not have been used much and they may have ordered a spare set just in case. ( Several printer manufacturers have set up their sensors in such a way that if one ink goes they make it awkward to impossible to just change one cartridge, even when you haven’t printed anything which needed magenta. So you are in reality chucking away €120 +.
Not only that it can be a PITA to set up a new printer.
And for many, if they were to work out the cost per sheet printed, on a particular printer,.they would have been cheaper to send it out to a decent printing service.
You are right about chargers, change the phone change the charger.

France

gallois wrote:

And how about phone chargers (at least the EU are doing something about that).

That was solved at least a decade ago when everyone started using USB to charge phones. In fact it’s quite rare these days to find a low voltage device (phone or otherwise) that isn’t charged by USB cable. Even Apple has been using USB since 2008 for this use (Lightning cables and the prior 30 pin cable all had a USB A at the charger end ever since the iPhone came out, and extra cables are really cheap – e.g. Amazon Basics lightning cable costs the same as a micro USB). And yes, Apple are using USB-C at the charger end these days.

As for printers, inkjet is a waste of time. Even the most basic laser printer is better.

Last Edited by alioth at 08 Nov 14:29
Andreas IOM

Yes laser printers are better, more expensive and heavier:) My old laser printer weighs a tonne which is why it always remains in my studio
But its a bit long in the tooth now and as such doesn’t qualify under the 12year law. When it packs in I’ll have to buy a new one, I just hope I can get one which will last as long as this one and be as good.

France

Colour laser? I’ve had some. HP. Crap colours, very expensive to run (£250 to refill) and using 3rd party refills destroys it.

The topic of this thread is just not going to happen with these products! Not unless you want to pay the full price i.e. £200 for an inkjet and £500 for a colour laser.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
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