Advanced Information Technology in Durable Goods: Some Concerns

Expected Lifetimes of Durable Goods

Many durable goods are intended to have relatively long usable lives (at least 10, often 20 years or more).

Examples include motor vehicles (cars, trucks, motorcycles, boats, airplanes, etc.), household appliances (stoves, dishwashers, refrigerators, washing machines, dryers, furnaces, heat pumps, etc.), heavy equipment (construction machinery, farming machinery, etc.), large medical equipment, and many more.

Items in this category that suffer severe degradation, wear, or breakage at after a short operating life because of weak materials, bad design, or other inherent deficiencies are regarded as being low quality and are at a sales disadvantage.

Some high technology durable goods are being promoted today on the basis that they will last for an exceptionally long time of use.  An example is the claim that current battery electric vehicles will keep running with minimal loss of performance for hundreds of thousands of miles, as a result of their long-lived electric motors and battery packs.

Maintainability and Reparability

Durable goods are expected to be maintainable and repairable.  Where a durable good has physical components that inherently have limited life (for example, tires, batteries, filters, etc. for a motor vehicle) they are expected to be designed for easy replacement with equivalent parts over the expected lifetime of the good.

Consumable parts of this type are expected to have standardized interfaces to allow form-fit-function replacement with a comparable part even if the original manufacturer of the part is no longer in business.  For example, tires can be replaced by equivalent ones produced by another manufacturer.

Advanced Information Technology Elements

What is not yet widely recognized is that it is very difficult to ensure that the advanced information technology elements being incorporated in durable goods have assured operating lifetimes comparable to the physical elements of the system.  See https://semiengineering.com/chasing-reliability-in-automotive-electronics/.  You don’t want the whole system to become unusable because some critical information technology component has failed prematurely.

According to a leading U.S. manufacturer of automotive devices, the average 2024 automobile contains 300 to 1,000 semiconductor chips.  Advanced battery electric cars may have as many as 3,000!  See https://polarsemi.com/blog/blog-semiconductor-chips-in-a-car/.  Besides chips, advanced touch screen displays are other examples of very high technology components being built into durable goods now.

In addition, there is a lot of software embedded in these systems—as much as 100 million lines of code for an automobile.  One website claims that by 2025 software will make up 30% of the manufacturer’s cost of producing an automobile.  See https://www.autopi.io/blog/what-is-automotive-software-and-its-benefits/.

Today there is a strong push to incorporate advanced artificial intelligence in information technology systems of all types, including embedded control devices.  This multiplies the complexity of these systems.

Characteristics of Advanced Information Technology Hardware Elements

It is important to recognize that semiconductor devices and software are NOT themselves durable items.  They exist in a different development universe than that of typical physical parts.  The fundamental technologies of semiconductor devices and embedded software are driven by markets for high-volume products like smartphones and data center compute servers.  Such systems are expected to have a relatively short life in the user’s hands before being replaced by new and better models.  Assured operating lifetime is not a prime consideration for them.

Semiconductor devices and embedded software are not sold to the end item manufacturers on the basis of demonstrated long operational life and guaranteed extended support.  The designs are proprietary, and do not have standardized form-fit-function interfaces.  Designs are regularly replaced with new models.

The manufacturing technology for semiconductor devices is continually changing to put ever more processing functionality on the real estate of a chip of a given physical size.  A chip design made in a manufacturing facility in 2024 will not be able to able to be made in that facility in 2028 because all of the tooling and manufacturing processes will have changed in the interim.  The result is that the system does not provide for drop-in replacement of advanced information technology elements by components from a successor supplier, unlike other physical parts.

Today the great majority of advanced technology semiconductor components are made by a single supplier, TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation).  Backups to this source are very limited.  Taiwan, of course, continues to be under threat of takeover by the Peoples’ Republic of China.

Supply of Parts

The supply of advanced information technology parts, for both the original production of the end user system and for lifetime replacement, has to come from the initial production run.  It is not going to be possible to restart production for an unanticipated need.  The manufacturer of the end system has to be sufficiently foresighted to order an adequate number of the parts to cover the lifetime demand, and has to pay for maintaining that inventory for many years.

If some critical one of these hundreds or thousands of semiconductor devices fails in your car and the manufacturer of your car says, “sorry, we sold the last one of those out of our inventory”, your car may stop being usable even though everything else is still functioning perfectly.

Characteristics of Advanced Information Technology Software Elements

The situation is similarly bad in the case of embedded software.  Software tends to be built in many layers.  The products that support each of the layers (e.g., operating systems, user interfaces) are continually revised and updated to increase capability, improve security, and extend performance.  The interactions between the layers are complex.  It is now essentially impossible to test all of the possible effects when changes are made to one or more of the layers.  So software can fail or degrade in unexpected ways when systems are updated due to those interactions.

A current trend is to provide wireless internet connectivity for over-the-air updating of software in advanced technology systems.  Unfortunately, this provides a significant vulnerability to systems in that they can be hacked by malevolent actors.  Any over-the-air update might contain malicious aspects, including ones that can be extremely difficult to correct.  See https://apple.news/A75-96wVvTWiHjburN25cvQ.  Robust cyberprotection should be built into such systems, but it is a significant cost that is often given inadequate attention, as it must be continually updated as threats evolve,

Another inadequately appreciated aspect of connected high technology systems is they provide the means for monitoring and surveillance of the system’s use.  In most cases this is benign, but it can involve things like compromised privacy and opportunities for authoritarian control.

Some Conclusions

The incorporation of ever larger amounts of advanced information technology into durable goods systems has risks that are not yet widely understood by the public.  The useful life of durable goods having advanced information technology elements may be significantly shorter than customers expect.  The information technology elements will likely result in problems earlier than the other physical elements of the system.

Having thousands of semiconductor chips from a wide range of producers running complex software that is not managed by a coordinating entity may turn out to be much less desirable than is being promoted.  Simpler systems, with less embedded cutting edge advanced technology elements, might actually be a better choice for users who want long operating lives for their durable goods.

A bottom line: large amounts of advanced information technology are likely to be a mixed blessing for durable goods, at best.

Standards should be promulgated to facilitate maintainability and reparability of high-technology intensive durable goods. Customers should know how long the manufacturer of a durable good will guarantee the availability of essential replacement parts.  Customers should demand robust cybersecurity for any durable good systems that are wirelessly connected to the Internet for software updating and usage monitoring.