I'm starting to think the short software support isn't a bug, it's a feature. They want the car to feel obsolete in 5 years so you're pushed into buying the next model. It's the smartphone sales model, but for a $50,000 purchase.
You design a new transmission to comply with federal regulations. The transmission is mostly an upgrade of previous designs and built in cooperation with multiple vendors. It's actually not a bad unit.
Which is a problem because it will be too reliable. So you take a small accessory component, like a valve body, and you undersize it and built it out of inappropriate materials. It now starves the transmission, causes it to run hot, and the nice transmission cooks itself to death under even the slightest load.
The hope is you won't even bother to buy and install a new $7000 part. Just scrap the car and get a new one!
If you're buying a new vehicle, find your favorite search engine, then search for "car model year reliability upgrade." You're almost certainly going to want to get a few of those done if you expect the car to be driving in more than 5 years.
I know brand loyalty can be iffy, but if you become known for your trans blowing up after 70K miles you're repeat buyers run away and fill the car reviews with 1-star warnings.
That's the rep Nissan has with their CVT transmissions.
You could also face a recall if enough of them do it.
Across all the cars you made that $.10 savings per transmission adds up to a lot of money on the bottom line. So manufactures look for ways to cut costs.
Maybe owning a Corolla for ten years as my first car and now a fairly old Highlander screwed up my baseline understanding of how car ownership should work. If I paid that much for a car and it lasted five years I would talk to a lawyer about a lawsuit. I've never done that before and never really think about doing that but that's completely unacceptable.
I certainly would never ever buy from that brand again. I don't know how they expect to have repeat customers. Judging from what I've heard though it sounds like they're struggling to get first customers and the new "cars" are just pilling up.
Between the car scams, the housing scams etc we could be facing a pretty steeply deflationary environment in the next couple years. I can't imagine the banks will continue financing this insanity for too much longer.
Thought it isn't quite as bad as stated - manufactures need their cars to have value as used cars for a while because very few people could afford to pay $70k for a new car without trading in something else that is still work $35k. And those people buying the $35k car in turn expect it to hold value for a while (either so they can trade it in for $15k in 5 years, or they expect to keep running for 10 years).
Which is to say if they made cars that only lasted 3 years they could only charge $35k for the high end ones, and a lot of people would be looking to buy a base model without the optional heater. Or worse for them, if cars become too unaffordable people will start demanding good public transit.
