Are boat equipment manufacturers taking us for a ride?

[alant]

How's this for longevity? I'm using the saucepans given to my mother as wedding presents 70 years ago.

What rig do they have?

 

[mjcoon]

How's this for longevity? I'm using the saucepans given to my mother as wedding presents 70 years ago.

Copper-bottomed?

Mike.

 

[westhinder]

My original post was just me putting forward an observation after reading numerous magazine articles and viewing many You Tube cruising vlogs, which had the consistent theme of equipment needing fixed/replaced, or disasters as a result of failed equipment. The owner/skipper/crew always seem to be spending more time and money dealing with failed equipment than enjoying their sailing.

Let us always bear in mind that this may be a slight distortion of reality. Articles or vlogs about successful and uneventful trips where nothing breaks and everything goes according to plan can be dull reading/viewing and hence not so attractive. It is only normal that they will focus on what is out of the ordinary or adds a little drama.
That being said, things do go wrong from time to time and compared to cars, the rate of failure on boats is undeniably higher, but that is at least in part thanks to much larger R&D budgets, much tougher prototype testing and vastly larger production runs for cars.
Still one always hopes some of the best practices will spill over into the boating world and improve reliability without necessarily driving up the cost.