Hacker News Reader

Comment by seeekr | Hacker News Reader

I think at some point the absurdity of the numbers (now it's 2M, soon it'll be 10M, 50M, ...) will become so great that NHTSA will stop calling this a "recall", and then this term will no longer be usable for clickbait article titles. Absurdity because it'll get harder and harder to imagine how a company might bring in millions and millions of vehicles in for service repeatedly, from a logistics and cost perspective, and still be able to grow and make a good profit.

View on HN

>and then this term will no longer be usable for clickbait article titles.

It's not clickbait, that's ridiculous. The essence of the article is the results of the investigation. NHSTA has a process, they investigated and issued a recall. The fact that it can be fixed OTA doesn't change the intent of what's happening. I mean, at what point does the first comment stop being, "It's not a recall!" Who cares.

I'm more interested in the obvious questions, like: does the update actually make anything safer? If it's so easy, why didn't Tesla do it on their own?

> If it's so easy, why didn't Tesla do it on their own?

It's situations like this that make me not trust Tesla and Musk. I always feel like they're misrepresenting the vehicle's capabilities, and I have no idea what I'm actually getting in terms of autopilot capabilities.

When I rode in a friend's Tesla, the real time display of the sensors did not inspire confidence. It missed a lot of cars and pedestrians.

I think the technology has a lot of transformative potential, but between their continuous hype over substance, ripping out lidar to be cheap, etc., it's just really hard to trust them.

> I'm more interested in the obvious questions, like: does the update actually make anything safer? If it's so easy, why didn't Tesla do it on their own?

Tesla has advertised many features which do not work reliably or, in some cases, at all. If they don’t want to admit that, they’re going to resist - especially if it’s going to fuel a class action lawsuit claiming that this feature is not in the state it was sold as.

The NHTSA does not have that conflicting set of incentives.

It is clickbait. Tesla hasn't "recalled" 2M vehicles, they're pushing a software patch. "Recall" is specifically jargon. It's a regulatory action. However (and this is precisely why this headline is clickbait) it has an alternate, more common meaning to the general population, which is "your car has a defective part, is unreliable, and needs to be brought in to have that part replaced."

This is a "recall" the same way your code needs a "recall" when you find a bug. It's not.

"your car has a defective part, *is unreliable*, and needs to be brought in to have that part replaced.".

Precisely! NHTSA determined that these vehicles are unreliable in this specific case, and thus need fixing. Glad we're on the same page. :-)

(I know, you want to pretend that it only ever means "physical repair" in everyone's mind, but that's a pretty big projection on your part.)

You not being aware of the use of the term doesn’t mean it’s clickbait. All a recall means is that the NHTSA is using its legal authority to have Tesla ensure that all vehicles with a safety concern are fixed. If Tesla can ship an update that easily, they can send the NHTSA a report showing each VIN having been verified as having the right firmware version.

NHSTA needs to reevaluate the usage of “recall” in situations where nothing is being physically recalled to the manufacturer’s facilities. It is only confusing people.

There are much clearer ways to phrase what has occurred like “Regulators force Tesla to issue mandatory OTA update to address issues with auto pilot”

Sorry, but do all teslas have starlink or whatever satellite provided connections? Are all cars connected to the internet? Until that happens, I want a recall that _can_ be fixed by an OTA update called a recall.

Because for sure my parents' next car will have OTA capacity, but also be disconnected by my dad. If it needs a software update, that vehicle will be driven to a garage. If you don't issue a recall anymore, it'll be dangerous.

Tesla gets to address recalls via OTA software updates right up to the point where they can not. Then, as you note, 2M+ vehicles needing physical replacement parts or rework will kill them because they have no way to do that. EVs are simple enough that they might avoid that scenario entirely.

But imagine one of those massive castings developing cracks and needing some reinforcements welded on in the field, or really any part. FEA is probably the most important tech that Tesla is dependent on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com