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Comment by kemitche | Hacker News Reader

Not quite a "recall" in the normal sense. They're disabling the "rolling stop at stop sign" feature of FSD for those in the beta.

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It isn't a "recall" in common English. So, the title and story are wrong. Very disappointing on the part of Reuters. This is not quality journalism.

Since they wrote it the way they did, I would guess there is some regulatory document that causes this to be classified a a "recall" for legal purposes. But it's incorrect to substitute legal language for common English language when there is a conflict between the two, except in legal contexts. That rule goes for technical language in general.

Is this practice more common in British English? I feel that it seems to appear more often in writing by British people, but that's anecdotal and could be incorrect.

As a brit, I would say no. But for your last line your thoughts matched mine.

Sorry to hear that. This practice degrades the signal to noise ratio of the language and in my view is absolutely indefensible. It's possible for languages to evolve in ways that make them objectively better or worse; we should strongly resist the latter. If we are sloppy and lazy, we make the language sloppy.

Reuters has been biased in their news telling for some time now.

Not entirely unlike the rest of the mainstream media, I would suppose.

It is literally a recall, though. A recall is a defined process with the NHTSA (and similar processes with other government safety agencies) to track vehicles that are somehow unsafe, and need some kind of service to be made safe again. There's a website that lists them: https://www.nhtsa.gov/recalls

That can be anything from "these airbags might not open when they're supposed to", like the Takeda problem, or "if water splashed just right on the bottom of the open door, you would have water next to electrical wires which could maybe start a fire" (an issue my car had a few years ago).

Tesla met with the NHTSA and agreed to issue a recall. How is it possibly bad journalism to call it what it is?

What you are describing is a recall in a regulatory and legal sense, but not in a common English sense. In common English, a recall is when the product has to be returned to the manufacturer or taken to a dealer for a fix. In other words, "recall" implies physical movement of a product. I guess you won't agree with me on what "recall" means in common English, and that's fine. And we probably have a deeper disagreement on where words get their meanings from. But I would maintain that a software update is not a "recall." If it is, Microsoft performs a "recall" every time it issues a security patch for Windows.

The update is not the "recall". The update is the remediation. The "recall" is the notification that the product may contain a safety defect in its current configuration, that those products require diagnosis and, potentially, remediation before they are safe again, and that Tesla is legally required to make reasonable efforts to diagnose and remediate safety defects in those products for free [1]. To fix your analogy, a "recall" is more like Microsoft releasing a security advisory or notifying users of a security vulnerability.

As for semantic arguments, obviously the current colloquial usage of the term "recall" means to call for products in use to be removed from use and potentially for remediation. However, the usage of the term in the article is the precise, legal, technical usage of the term meaning what I stated above. This usage and definition by NHTSA predates the colloquial definition and was thus not confusing at the time it was defined, and is both precise and has been precisely used by NHTSA for duration of its usage of the term so their usage of the term has not materially changed in the interim. Therefore, it is both technically, semantically, and culturally correct to use the term "recall" in this specific instance even though the colloquial usage of the term has changed underneath them. This is in contrast with Tesla's usage of the term Autopilot which does correspond with your concerns as it was coined after the colloquial usage had already shifted, and limited effort was made to precisely define and inform potential stakeholders of any differences in terminology with respect to the colloquial usage.

[1] https://www-odi.nhtsa.dot.gov/recalls/recallproblems.cfm

> This usage and definition by NHTSA predates the colloquial definition

I don't think that's right, because countries could "recall" ambassadors, or parliament could be "recalled." Essentially, "recall" means "to bring back." If you aren't bringing something back, it isn't a recall. I don't have time to do the etymological research, so this could be wrong, but it isn't likely. (IIRC I used to be able to access the Oxford English Dictionary for free online, but I'm finding that now I can't.)

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