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Comment by flounder3 | Hacker News Reader

It’s the law. OTA updates are not instant nor are they 100% guaranteed, so consumers must be notified.

So just to be clear:

- they knew the assist was dangerously broken - while people drove around with this dangerous code running they worked on improving the code so they could say it is now "fixed" - released the update

I see how this is the most... efficient... way to handle the situation, from a monetary perspective. But this is not how I, or anyone I know, would handle life-critical code. Not to bring politics into yet another thread, but this is not a smart or human way to handle things.

First, you disable the damn road assist. It's an optional feature, FFS!

I think "power steering assist" here is another technical term that misleads people who aren't car nerds. It's not some kind of lane assist feature, it's the system that makes the steering wheel easy to turn at low speeds. Anyone who's used to driving cars built after 1950 or so would not consider it an optional feature.

Sounds efficient.

It's not meant to be efficient; it's meant to be thorough, and auditable, and if required, able to be litigated in court.

It's also used in warranty claims in the private market.

To notify consumers of safety issues using the existing rails that are used to notify consumers of safety issues?

The economy of thought that you brought to that comment could be seen as impressively efficient, depending on the outcome you want to optimize for given inputs.

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