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Comment by moralestapia | Hacker News Reader

>But haven't we all seen Fight Club?

???

http://inaneexplained.blogspot.com/2011/03/fight-club-car-re...

TL;DR; If there's a defect that kills or maims people, car manufacturers compute if it's cheaper to recall or just deal with the lawsuits.

And this happens regularly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed

There's always a tradeoff between cost and safety, how else would you imagine this to work?

Maybe cars with known technical/mechanical defects that will result in death could be recalled even in cases where it eats a bit more into the profits of the auto manufacturer than it would if they just paid settlements to the families who lost loved ones. That seems like a pretty good way to imagine this to work.

The proposed alternative, I think, is that the car company values a customer's life at more than the expected cost of settling.

The cost of settling is supposed to approximate the value of a human life, but it sounds pretty bad to say "yeah, we knew this defect would cost $50MM to fix, but we estimated only 5 people would die, and each person's life is worth less than $10MM because the settlement is only like $400k per life".

The proposed alternative is that the car company has to say "We calculated this defect will probably kill 5 people, so we will spend any amount of money to fix it, up to and including us having no profit"

I imagine that they'd ddmit that the car as designed is bad and fix or replace the bad cars. Leaving cars on the road that have a design flaw that randomly kills people, because it's cheaper to pay off dead people's families is reprehensible.

There's a question about what a design flaw means though. What about a car that was built without a backup camera because it was older than when they were commonly included? Or built when they were commonly available, but not before they were mandated? Is that a design flaw?

What about something that's more accidental that causes fewer deaths than the lack of a backup camera, but also costs more to fix than retrofitting a backup camera?

Legally, it’s up to the jury.

Each side has the right to bring in experts to testify about what were reasonable design choices, what was greed, and what was just a bone headed mistake.

If the jury concludes that the product wasn’t unreasonably dangerous or defective, defendant wins. If they find that is was, plaintiff wins.

By treating any lies to the customer as criminal fraud.

For some reason misleading investors in a way that causes them to loose money lands you in jail very quickly. You must provide extensive 'inverstment risk' report with the shares you are selling.

But when selling a car or tickets to faulty and deadly airplane, you don't have to inform customers of all the flaws you've discovered.

The lawsuits of Theranos case and Anna Sorokin make it clear that our society has one set of laws for owners of capital, and another one for the plebs.

> And this happens regularly

Do you have an example to demonstrate regularity that's not nearly 60 years old?

Thesr lawyers claim they got a multi million settlement out of a manufacturer of a defective automobile recently:

https://www.raphaelsonlaw.com/questions/how-much-to-expect-f...

Since it's out-of-court, there is probably a non disclosure agreement. Anyway, it happens enough for lawyers to think it's worth targeting the cases, at least.

Honestly, I didn't read that link extensively. It went straight to a sleezey looking "How Much to Expect From a Car Accident Settlement?" That didn't sound like it justified the usage of "regularly" in the statement I responded to.

Feel free to correct me on how its related to the use of "regularly" tho.

Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

Business woman on plane: Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?

Narrator: You wouldn't believe.

Business woman on plane: Which car company do you work for?

Narrator: A major one.

https://youtu.be/SiB8GVMNJkE

Have you seen the movie, if I remember the scene correctly Norton discusses the financial incentives leading to auto product recalls. I don’t think this is accurate in real life although Boeing hasn’t inspired much confidence.

>I don’t think this is accurate in real life

Ehhhh I mean they often don’t say the quiet part out loud but many companies definitely run a variation of the equation he describes.

The "Pinto Memo" [1] being a notable example. Although, as the article says, the cost / benefit analysis was against "societal costs" of the safety issues, not just the cost of litigation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Cost%E2%80%93benefi...

Yeah, very good example and explanation

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