Hard to imagine this working, even in a perfect world. Set aside regulatory capture and corruption and politicking and pretend that everybody does a genuine best-effort attempt to be honest.
It's extremely hard to know ahead of time which products will ultimately be reliable and which will be flaky. Most flaky components weren't designed with that in mind -- there are some exceptions, but maintenance headaches are normally a mistake by the manufacturer. And even setting that aside, a big part of "cheap to maintain" is how many units you ship: part of why it's cheap to maintain a Civic or a Corolla is because they made millions of them, parts are everywhere, and every shop knows how to deal with them. But knowing up front if your product is going to be a hit or a flop is just not generally possible, even though that has a huge impact on maintenance costs.
Even in a world of angels, I don't know that this idea would work in general. Maybe if it was specific to some industries where the costs are easier to estimate?
It’s already the case that you have to do this for certain groups of products in France under the AGEC laws. Take for example this dishwasher: https://www.ikea.com/fr/fr/p/diskad-lave-vaisselle-encastrab... . It has an “indice de répairabilité” of 7.4, generated from a bunch of different factors such as ease of disassembly, availability of spare parts and documentation, and the ability to factory-reset it. The data sheet listing those factors for this model is here: https://www.ikea.com/fr/fr/files/pdf/4f/fd/4ffd4fd2/indice-d...
I don't know what, if any, regulations are involved but here in Norway several of the big electrical retailers have started publishing the expected lifetime of products together with statement of how long spares will be available.
For example the Ankarsrum food mixer (successor to the classic Electrolux Assistent) entry at Elkjop.no states that the expected lifetime is 30 years and that spares will be available for 12 years.
I like that a lot. Judging from the criteria (in my extremely limited French) it’s a measure of effort rather than outcome, but honestly effort is all we can really ask for.
No: it’s fairly recent (and in fact only a part of the wider set of AGEC requirements that include labelling for recyclability, recycled status, consumption of rare earths and precious metals, origin of textiles, etc.) And then there’s the EU-wide Digital Product Passport[1] coming in the next few years that’ll up the game again. We’ll see over the coming years what customer perception is like.
It's extremely hard to know ahead of time which products will ultimately be reliable and which will be flaky. Most flaky components weren't designed with that in mind -- there are some exceptions, but maintenance headaches are normally a mistake by the manufacturer. And even setting that aside, a big part of "cheap to maintain" is how many units you ship: part of why it's cheap to maintain a Civic or a Corolla is because they made millions of them, parts are everywhere, and every shop knows how to deal with them. But knowing up front if your product is going to be a hit or a flop is just not generally possible, even though that has a huge impact on maintenance costs.
Even in a world of angels, I don't know that this idea would work in general. Maybe if it was specific to some industries where the costs are easier to estimate?