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Comment by schiffern | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot here about technical and legal definitions, but from the customer's perspective what they mostly care about is the inconvenience associated with a physical recall.

Most people are accustomed to our phones and devices (auto-)updating, so software recalls just get mentally bundled in with that.

The reporting seems dishonest because (in the mind of most readers) the headline exaggerates the inconvenience of Tesla ownership. Even though logically people shouldn't necessarily conclude that (because of the technical/legal definition of "recall" already discussed), that's still going to be the general public perception.

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> There's a lot here about technical and legal definitions, but from the customer's perspective what they mostly care about is the inconvenience associated with a physical recall.

No, customers care about the safety of their vehicles.

If there wasn't a safety issue, then customers could safely ignore the recall notice and experience no inconvenience.

> No, customers care about the safety of their vehicles.

Yes. But safety is a spectrum, and is denominated in inconvenience against perceived expected loss - perceived, because people round the loss down to 0 when they feel like it won't happen to them.

See: how many people don't fasten their seat belts, or hold a phone in their hand while driving, despite both being highly dangerous to life, limb and wallet, and against huge social and regulatory pressure.

See also: how many people ignore or tape over error lights on the dashboard; how many people don't repair stuff until absolutely necessary.

See also: how many people try to bribe their way through yearly inspections, and would happily skip them entirely if the law didn't force them.

So it's like GP said: people mostly care about how much time and money they're going to waste on the newly discovered problem. A recall involving the car being physically taken to manufacturer is hugely disturbing, possibly very costly (it's not like most people drive for fun). A recall involving an OTA update? That's "just another auto-update ¯\_(ツ)_/¯". Most people won't even notice it happening.

Putting the two types of "recall" in the same class is, from regular person's POV, deception through equivocation.

The people who won't wear seatbelts, who tape over dashboard lights, who would skip inspections, will also ignore recall notices, so for them, for those who don't care much about safety, dealership recalls are not an inconvenience. And they probably don't care one way or the other about OTA recalls either.

The people who bring their vehicles in for dealership recalls do care about safety, otherwise they would have ignored the recall notice, like the people who don't care.

You can compare the vehicle software updates to non-vehicle software updates. Those who don't care about security will happily ignore security updates and continue to use old versions of the software on their computers forever. And those who do care about security will update, even if the updates tend to cause other problems, such as removing features or otherwise making the UI worse.

Some people do not care about safety so we should change the definition of what a recall is and blame an article for being deceptive?

You gave a bunch of examples of some people not caring about safety then generalized to everyone. You may be in a bubble, or you may not be, but you're presenting zero evidence to call the article deceptive.

> No, customers care about the safety of their vehicles.

People can (and do) care about both safety and inconvenience, to varying degrees. The exact degree depends on the level of safety risk and the level of inconvenience.

Your odd claim that people don't care about inconvenience is unsupported by data or just plain common sense.

I see you didn't even try to refute that the article will predictably mislead the average reader (classic "lie without lying") about the level of inconvenience for owners.

> Your odd claim that people don't care about inconvenience is unsupported by data or just plain common sense.

This is a bizarre interpretation of my comment. Of course people care about inconvenience. But obviously the people who bring in their cars to a dealership for a recall care more about safety than about inconvenience, because ignoring the recall notice entirely would be much more convenient.

> I see you didn't even try to refute that the article will predictably mislead the average reader (classic "lie without lying") about the level of inconvenience for owners.

The article didn't even mention inconvenience. That's a red herring. On the contrary, the article said this:

Most Cybertruck buyers pay scant attention to longevity estimates, believes Edmunds’ Drury, and plenty probably aren’t exercised by recalls, OTA or otherwise, he said. “Cybertruck customers are in it for the stares and glares—they don’t care about how many times [this vehicle is] going to be recalled over 30 years,” says Drury. “They’re buying this car for now, with zero thought to the future.”

  > The article didn't even mention inconvenience. That's a red herring

It's not a red herring, it's the primary point I was making.

Point is, the impression most people will undeniably take away from "many recalls" is that the vehicle must be in the shop all the time, and it's a terrible customer experience. This impression is of course incorrect.

Remember that most readers don't even read past the headline. You and I and most HN readers are the exception. Obviously the Cybertruck customers themselves know better (we both agree on that), but it's still misleading language that predictably leaves the wrong impression with potential customers.

You can argue that readers "ought to know better," but that's disingenuously ignoring the way the headline will actually be interpreted by real people in the real world.

The only surprise is how many smart people rush to defend the media using a transparently obvious "lie without lying" tactic, but I guess that's why it's so effective! Smart people don't even detect the mislead (Curse of Knowledge). The smart folks who do see it immediately get nerd-sniped into full-blown denial of the "lay misinterpretation" by the seemingly irresistible temptation of a smarter-than-thou semantics argument (see above).

I guess we're fine with media misinformation if we can tell ourselves it's because the reader is dumb, and if "other tribe bad" companies are the ones who got smeared.

> My point is, the impression many people will unavoidably take away from "many recalls" is that the vehicle must me in the shop all the time, and it's a terrible customer experience.

I still think you're missing the point. The biggest problem from many recalls is not time spent in the shop; rather, the biggest problem from many recalls is many vehicle safety defects that are deemed worthy of a recall. In other words, many possible dangers from driving the vehicle. It's an indicator of poor design and quality assurance, which can also reduce the expected lifespan of the vehicle and slash its resale value.

> Remember that most readers don't even read past the headline.

Do we really need to care about these people?

I've been blogging for almost two decades now, and it's very hard to write a fully informative, fully accurate headline. There just aren't enough characters available, unless you write an absurdly long headline. I have no doubt that the news media experience the same problem. There's no good solution for willful ignorance.

I really have zero sympathy for how non-readers of articles ignorantly misinterpret headlines. You can't idiot-proof the news.

> Do we really need to care about these people?

Yes, because it's most people. It's most of your addressable market, whatever you're selling. It's also their siblings and parents and spouses. Some of mine, too. Possibly even yours.

> it's very hard to write a fully informative, fully accurate headline (...) I have no doubt that the news media experience the same problem. There's no good solution for willful ignorance.

This is a problem too, but it's not the problem. The problem is that a lot of the news headlines intentionally lie. The pattern is, put a purposefully misleading statement in the headline, then correct it in the article. The lie works as clickbait, but it's not its only effect: everyone in publishing knows most people don't read past headline - that's simply because they'll see 10 or 100 headlines for any single article they can afford to read. Even the non-willfully ignorant will be exposed to 99 simplistic lies for each nuanced opinion.

> I really have zero sympathy for how non-readers of articles ignorantly misinterpret headlines. You can't idiot-proof the news.

For any article, those "non-readers" are by far the vast majority of people exposed to it. You can't really prevent it, as it's a function of the amount of news. But you also shouldn't exploit it to sell people lies and propaganda.

> Yes, because it's most people. It's most of your addressable market, whatever you're selling. It's also their siblings and parents and spouses. Some of mine, too. Possibly even yours.

No, this is vastly overstated. Most people in the world never saw the headline of the linked article.

> The problem is that a lot of the news headlines intentionally lie. The pattern is, put a purposefully misleading statement in the headline, then correct it in the article.

The headline in question did not lie. Nor did it mislead. The headline is accurate. Of course there's more to the story, which one can read in the story if one chooses. But this notion of an intentional lie just seems to come from the minds of Tesla apologists and not from any reality outside their minds. I disagree entirely with the notion.

Here's a question: how would you rewrite the headline?

How about "Cybertruck’s Many Safety Defects Make It Worse Than 91 Percent of All 2024 Vehicles"? Would you prefer that?

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