Hacker News Reader

Fail-safe's, especially fail-safe hardware, should operate in a safe fashion whether the user does what you want to or not.

You shouldn't get to excuse safety incidents with "well we wrote it in the manual, it's not our fault, it's on the user". If your users are not actually following the safety precautions you expect, then you clearly did not engineer your product for the real world (which, frankly, is part of the definition of engineering).

With any mass-produced product, you have to assume that your users will not all follow the exact directions. This is the difference between your theoretical user, and your real-world usage.

As far as I know, it's not impossible to design a treadmill that would stop even if the "safety key" is still in. Maybe if it's facing significant resistance, but there is no downward weight on the device? Doesn't really seem like a valid situation for a treadmill, so it should stop. If you want to say "well it doesn't have sensors to detect that!", then maybe it should.

That is just the first thought off the top of my head; I am not a treadmill designer. I would expect people who are full-time treadmill designers to be able to come up with some better solutions.

> I also challenge you to find me a treadmill that wouldn't react in the exact same fashion

Your point may be valid here, but claiming "all treadmills are unsafe, so making unsafe treadmills is perfectly okay and we shouldn't expect any better from a $25B company" is a shitty attitude.

So what's your fix? All razorblades are unsafe, we still make razorblades. $25B companies haven't figured out a way to make a razorblade safe for a child to use.

So instead, we just don't let small children handle them, because that would be dangerous. Just like we make safety mechanisms for treadmills so children can't hurt themselves, but when adults refuse to use those safety mechanisms children can get hurt. And the list goes on:

Bathtubs. Wall outlets. Plastic bags. Guns. Large animals. Small magnets. Cleaning chemicals.

I assume you've got a fix for making all of those safe for children in a way that doesn't require an adult?

All razorblades are unsafe, we still make razorblades.

You've seriously never heard of the term 'safety razor'? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_razor

Now, they're still not things that you would give to a child, but the point is, we don't just throw our hands up and say 'razors will never be safe, why bother?' but instead, we try to make them safer. Doing nothing because we can never achieve perfect safety is reckless and uncaring.

Safety razor still cut... my face knows that for a fact.

They nick surface skin. They don't sever arteries like a straight razor could. They don't accidentally slice your jugular.

A safety treadmill would--instead of sucking a child underneath and pinning them--give them a friction burn or pinch their arm.

It's a guard. Add a guard around the roller and you eliminate this scenario.

we made safety razors because they're safer for the user's face, not because they're safer for children to play with. Both safety razors (or the replacement blades) and straight razors must be kept from children.

This is, with all due respect, an absolutely stupid comparison.

You are taking something that is fundamentally not-safe as a function of what it is, and the job it needs to perform. With out current level of technology, there is no practical way to make a single razor blade "safe" by your definition. There are fundamental, global safety issues (sharp things are sharp, corrosive chemicals are corrosive) that are impossible to avoid, because the safety-issue is tied directly to the fundamental function.

There is absolutely no fundamental function of a treadmill that requires the ability to kill a small child.

Are you claiming that it is fundamentally impossible to make a treadmill that is safer?

For what it's worth, there are attempts to make even-dangerous-things less dangerous, by limiting the danger. Instead of full-sized razors, you get little razors already embedded in a plastic casing. You engineer cleaning products that are household-acceptable and less-poisonous.

Just because there is some object out that there is not safe, does not mean that other things shouldn't be made safer when possible. Safety-precautions and safe engineering is not an all-or-nothing thing that has to be 100% across the whole world.

> So what's your fix?

You attempting to make solving all of the worlds safety problems my problem is bullshit. I explicitly stated that treadmill engineering is NOT my job.

---

PS. Don't even try to compare gun safety to treadmill safety. As far as I know there isn't a National Treadmill Association trying to make Treadmills as accessible as possible and actively pushing back against any safety initiatives.

This is the most bullshit, side-lining, "attempt to distract from the actual issue" argument that I've ever seen on this site. And that's saying something.

>You are taking something that is fundamentally not-safe as a function of what it is

A plastic bag is fundamentally not-safe?

>You attempting to make solving all of the worlds safety problems my problem is bullshit. I explicitly stated that treadmill engineering is NOT my job.

And yet you have no issue claiming despite the fact NO treadmill manufacturer has been able to come up with a fix, that they should be able to. So "this is an easy problem but I have no idea what the solution is".

It absolutely is not lazy parents and this victim blaming is ridiculous. I have no idea where the concept that parents have to be 100% attentive to everything their child does at all times, but it is completely unrealistic.

And for the record, the death happened while the treadmill was in proper use, so while it's true some of these accidents may have been prevented by removing the safety key, not all of them would have.

>It absolutely is not lazy parents and this victim blaming is ridiculous. I have no idea where the concept that parents have to be 100% attentive to everything their child does at all times, but it is completely unrealistic.

I have a child. I remove the safety key when I'm not using the treadmill. I am not 100% attentive at all times and I don't need to be. It is not ridiculous to expect a parent to take basic measure to protect their child from dangerous objects around the house. Knives are placed out of reach. Chemicals are in a locked cabinet. The treadmill has the safety key removed.

>And for the record, the death happened while the treadmill was in proper use, so while it's true some of these accidents may have been prevented by removing the safety key, not all of them would have.

Citation? The CSPC has yet to release any details that I've seen.

Have you watched the video? It’s pretty jarring. The treadmill doesn’t even stop when the kid caused the tread to stop because his body was so wedged underneath it. It just kept trying.

I have watched the video, I can recreate that video with a non-peloton treadmill like the one at my gym. It doesn't stop either.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNlX4VaN2bU

Which, again, is why there's a magnetic safety key that takes seconds to remove so that something like this doesn't happen.

You know the interesting thing about treadmills designed for a gym? They aren't sold to people as a household appliance that has children around.

This goes right back to my "designing for the real world" point. If you are designing and selling a "at home" treadmill, you have different use cases, risks, concerns than designing one for a gym.

As I understand it the Peloton treadmill upon detecting a jam will reverse for a second and then run full speed forward in an attempt presumably to clear the jam. Except if the jam is a child it will just suck them in despite detecting a problem.

We wouldn't need seatbelts if people would just stop crashing their cars.

We wouldn't need warnings on coffee cups if people would just stop holding hot coffee in their lap.

And on and on. People make mistakes. People are lazy. People do unanticipated things that designers didn't consider. We shouldn't allow toddlers to die because people aren't perfect.

Fwiw, I agree (mostly) with you (and don't understand the tone of this comment section... at ... all.. ).

- Would either either a recall or an offer of free child-safety package be a nice brand-repairing option? yes. - Should we regulate the industry for one company's lack thereof? no.

I must be getting old. All I could think when reading this thread was, "This is why we can't have nice things". What if you want to buy an aesthetically (maybe even functionally) pleasing, but unsafe-if-misused device? Why must we optimize for child safety, when a modicum of awareness/prevention and/or training would suffice?

A better comparison than razor blades: motorcycles. In most states, if a child isn't required to be in a safety seat, they aren't prohibited from being a motorcycle passenger - despite it being statistically less safe than any car.

The difference is because you have to make an active decision to put the child on the motorcycle. No parent is deciding to put their child under the any treadmill. And no other treadmills suffer from this issue. Also, there is no reason that this treadmill can't be safe and remain aesthetically pleasing, you produced a false dichotomy.

I posted two links to other treadmills that suffer from this exact issue. The fact you fail to acknowledge that just re-affirms my point that people are either intentionally or unintentionally being ignorant to the fact that ALL treadmills are dangerous for children and nothing about Peloton is unique beyond the fact they're a popular name so they get headlines.

The tread was released in 2019. The CSPC reported 30 deaths from 2017-2019 from treadmills, none of which we peloton (I've yet to be able to find details beyond that on those deaths) - so to say this is a Peloton problem is not accurate or even a little bit fair.

Safetyism is in vogue. The J&J vaccine pause is another recent example. We have collectively lost the ability to think about risk-reward trade-offs in a mature fashion.