this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
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Nah I like the term recall. Just because the fix is "easy" doesn't mean the product wasn't broken. Automakers should take the software in their cars seriously especially the ones that market their cars like a cell phone.
Broken software shouldn’t be accepted as much as it is. Especially in safety critical systems like cars, especially when they remove manual controls for things like steering, brakes, hand brakes and door handles. Fly/drive by wire is more dangerous when the software is unreliable. Mechanical linkages fail immediately or take a long time. Bad software fails in uncertain and potentially chaotic ways.
I just think it's useful to have different words for things that can be easily fixed without having to go get the car to a mechanic and having no immediate safety impact, and things that may require you to take the vehicle to a mechanic ASAP because there is immediate serious danger. They should not be in the same category, and people should be aware that they require different levels of attention and urgency. When it's all just referred to as a "recall", people will start to not take them seriously when they more often than not are minor things like this.
I think a "recall" has a very specific legal definition, where the manufacturer has strictly defined responsibilities (identifying and notifying owners of affected vehicles would be one of those). It wouldn't surprise me if there was some external agency that acted as an auditor on that.
On the other hand, manufacturers can put out a "service action" bulletin, where a particular repair is free to the vehicle owner, but none of those recall responsibilities are in place. This means that, for example, vehicle owners are not notified, so you just need to bring your vehicle in with the complaint specified in the service action. In this case, the vehicle owner might need to point out that there's a service action, because a shady dealer will pretend it doesn't exist, charge you for the repair, and also submit the repair to the manufacturer for reimbursement. This was a lot easier to do before the internet, since the information about that service action wasn't readily available to the public.
A recall implies the product is irreparably damaged, or too expensive to repair, and needs to be returned/replaced.
This framing benefits corporations, because the average recall is relatively minimal and inconsequential, the public will grow to consider "recalls" as normal instead of "potentially deadly failure/defect", and make it easier for corporate sociopaths like Space Karen to scream gubberment overreach. The wording should reflect the risk to life/public health (e.g. potential to cause harm/death) as well as the cost to repair/replace (quantify the severity of the failure/defect).
The greater the access and granularity consumers have to this type of data, the greater the benefit to society. Any corporation, politician or lobby group arguing otherwise is your enemy.
No, it does not. I can't think of an automotive recall that wasn't repaired and resulted in a buyback. I'm sure there was one or two, I just can't think of them. Edit: Here's the list. And most of those have to do with bad welds or badly adhering paint (which affects windshields in collisions).
Lots of cars from all manufacturers end up with recalls that get fixed as a matter of course.
Tesla owners are not notified as such when the recalls are fixed by SW updates, they just get an update pushed to the car and a request in the car that there is an update ready to install.
Maybe that counts as the notification? I've never owned a car that does OTA shit. All the recalls that have applied to any of my cars have been mailed to me directly, sometimes even well before they are even able to be repaired, waiting on parts availability.
They absolutely do have to notify people of mandatory recalls and it's not even up to the company. This person does not know what they are talking about. There's a difference between a mandatory recall (mandated by the NHTSA/Government), and a voluntary one. Every other car manufacture sends out information to their customers about mandatory recalls (yes, even software updates, yes, even when they're OTA fixes). Tesla isn't special. They still have to comply with the law.
Maybe, IDK...I've never had a car with a recall on it before.
It's not useful at all, knowing which brand sells shitty cars that have major issues is a good thing, this whole attitude that you can do OTA fix something therefore it's fine and we can ship bad product is fucking ridiculous attitude to a multi-ton weapon capable of killing multiple people
It’s worse than that, people will argue shipping good code is impossible. Good testing is hard, so it’s avoided for things like unit tests. Something that’s only equivalent to basic QA in manufacturing. Every software functions is a design change and the system needs to be fully validated and tested. That’s means driving the car, and not shipping the code and using the users cars to prove your design.
The problem is, and of course when it matters I forget the specifics, that there are many times when language is changed to soften how bad something is and it results in people not taking things seriously.
The issue here is cars being shipped in a broken state, that’s it. They recall the vehicles and force people to skip out of work or whatever to get this shit done because their products suck, and if they wanted to not deal with that then maybe they should products that don’t suck. They can also collect a bunch of these issues, seeing as they’re common, and either make a patch of several minor issues or just say that the problem will be addressed at the next service. This is entirely on the companies to save their image, not us to change our language to make them feel better.
But recall meaning you call the products back, so they can be fixed, or not? This seems not the case here, just a safety relevant bugfix..