Hacker News Reader

Comment by xeromal | Hacker News Reader

At this point I swear publishing stories on Tesla "recalls" are hit pieces. God forbid your car gets an update that takes 15 minutes OTA

View on HN

>The agency says that the brake, park and anti-lock brake warning lights have a smaller font size than required by federal safety standards.

How is it a hit piece? Tesla did not implement the federal safety standards correctly.

Because the articles don't make it super obvious in the headline that it's a software update.

Ya there is a bunch of missing information from the headline... thats why there is an article, to talk about it.

We both know most people don't hence the journalistic integrity required to write a headline properly conveying the severity which is "It ain't shit."

Ahhh, so the company is required to put all the juice in the headline, to save you a click, so they don't get your view. The current headline provides factual information and is in no way clickbait. As far as NYT Post headlines go... this has got the be the least egregious. If you want to be informed, RTFA. Why should we reorganize society for the laziest individual? That is the path to Idiocracy.

FWIW, journalists literally don’t write their own headlines.

That’s an editor or sub-editor’s domain.

No there is an article to grab your attention, to sell advertisements to you.

Oh c'mon, you know damn well that most people only read headlines and not the article.

Even people on HN are guilty of this.

The solution for many recalls these days is quite often a software update.

No, what's notable is Tesla was forced to issue the update. This probably has consequences for Tesla beyond some bandwidth.

I'm glad our regulators have teeth. I'm just annoyed with these headlines "Largest auto recall of 2.2 million cars" which gives images of piles of teslas being sent to service centers to be retrofitted when you can pay a single software engineer a few weeks of salary to solve the problem.

> The solution for many recalls these days is quite often a software update.

That other manufacturers force owners to bring their car to the dealer for.

Tesla wasn't actually being forced. In the past, other automakers like Ford, GM, Porsche and Kia/Hyundai ran into the exact same problem. They just filed an inconsequential non-compliance petition to NHTSA because this issue is so minor and it would have been too expensive to fix --- for them. Source: https://youtu.be/480yxR_kmIg?si=dThdJD2_QceCyF_E&t=161

People assume the absolute worst when they see the word "recall".

There's a huge gulf between people that keep up with tech news and people that don't. Millions of people are likely unaware that Tesla cars get software updates at all, let alone over the air.

So when they see an article with a headline of "Latest recall at Elon Musk’s Tesla affecting 2.2M vehicles", they assume Tesla owners all over the country are having to take their cars to a service center to get fixed. Many will probably assume the cars are fundamentally broken or unsafe until the car gets taken in.

The cars are fundamentally unsafe until fixed. That is what a recall means: there is a safety defect requiring prompt removal of unfixed cars.

The manufacturer can avoid refunds by fixing their defective product by creating a new, safe, fixed version and upgrading all owners for free. Whether that can be done remotely is independent of the presence of a safety defect demanding removal of all cars still containing that defect.

> The cars are fundamentally unsafe until fixed.

Oh please, get real.

So some icons on the display are a little too small. I would not label that "fundamentally unsafe".

I think of "fundamentally unsafe" and I think of something that has a high likelihood of causing a crash. Icons being just a smaller than they should be do not fit that description.

Instead of an icon that contained text at the bottom that was slightly smaller than 3.2mm, they are replacing the icon with huge text PARK

https://twitter.com/DriveTeslaca/status/1753302155275157637

https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2024/RCLRPT-24V051-2023.PDF

It is a trivial change that will not impact safety

> God forbid your car gets an update that takes 15 minutes OTA

I've had updates take damn near 2 hours. >.<

I make sure to only update at home and when I don't expect to be driving the rest of the day. If something came up, I could always take my wife's car.

> At this point I swear publishing stories on Tesla "recalls" are hit pieces

Normally I would agree, but this is the NYPost which is pretty friendly to conservatives(1). Maybe they attack Tesla because it's "green" tech but defend Elon in the context of Tesla/SpaceX? Just a guess as I'm not a regular reader.

1: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart

Most likely they just want clicks.

It's always this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com