Manufacturers are required by law to have replacement parts available for 10 years. Unfortunately, replacement “parts” sometimes are whole sub assemblies rather than the single small piece needed. So the $3 piece ends up being $300. Or the parts are available on an extended timeline that technically meets the requirement, but not to a customer waiting for that part.

We won’t even get into the fact that true appliance repair people don’t really exist anymore. Parts replacers are more the norm than the exception.

parts replacers also for most electronic devices as well

agree with you there k giov

I cho se a gas range that can be operated with no electric power for this reason (this applies to just the burners on top, not the oven). I did that because I'd had two appliances where a small circuit board would die and the replacement was $300 the first time, and unavailable the second time. I figured something simple enough to run without electric power would have WAY less electronics in it. And we had power outages and I thought it would be nice to use the range when that happened.

BUT - that means no self clean cycle. No preheat cycle on the oven. No timer built in. I mean, I'm used to it, but it is more bare bones than most people are used to. Still a trade I'm happy with, the range has been great.

BBjt

Appliance parts may go NLA for many reasons, including the source vendor going out-of-business ... or suffering a catastrophe such as the 2011 tsunami that hit Japan. One may wonder why a new source/vendor can't be arranged but as with any industry there are factors which may make that unfeasible.

The whole thing does get crazy nowadays, with many manufacturers engineering every successive model with different parts that don't fit any past or future models.