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My iphone can't kill someone else moving 70 mph down the highway during the normal course of its operation.
Not if the Mossad has anything to say about it.
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This has nothing to do with his point, which is that its a software update, not a typical 'recall'
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> My iphone can't kill someone else moving 70 mph down the highway during the normal course of its operation.

How do you know if you haven't tried?

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An iPhone hitting someone in the head at 70mph could indeed kill them.
Welllll it can if you're looking at it instead of the road. But I get your point
Sure it can, if the overcharge protection built into the battery malfunctions for some reason. There is speculation that a battery overcharge bug was fixed in a recent update issued to old Pixels.
You'd be surprised how many phones are involved with car accidents though.

The issue here is with the word recall, which is slightly alarmist This is a bit of a non-event for owners and they'll get a completely routine over the air firmware upgrade soonish with some mandated changes. No dealers are involved. Just a simple update.

Somehow a lot of these recalls are limited to the US only. Which raises a few questions of course about the rest of the world and what Tesla is doing there. I think it's just the language and the processes of the NHTSA that result in this clickbaity reporting. Also a lot of cars ship without over the air update capabilities. What happens with recalls for those?

For example, when the wheels may come off in a Toyota (NHTSA 23V432000), it's somehow less news worthy than when it is about a Tesla. That one got a "do not drive" advice along with the recall BTW, as you'd hope. It only affected a few hundred cars fortunately. But I bet more care owners and mechanics did work to double check they weren't affected. That happened 2 years ago. Not all recalls are similarly scary, of course. Most are quite boring actually. Especially Tesla ones.

There's a helpful tool (https://datahub.transportation.gov/stories/s/NHTSA-Recalls-b...) that allows you to slice and dice recall data by manufacturer. There are a lot of recalls. The vast majority are real recalls involving component replacements from car manufacturers that are mostly not Tesla. Tesla seems to be able to address their issues via software mostly. By the numbers, maybe be careful with Ford, GM, or Toyota. Lots of recalls for those. Parts falling of causing crashes. Electrical failures resulting in drive train failure mid drive. You know, minor issues like that. Totally not worth reporting on hacker news because it doesn't involve Tesla or Elon Musk.

This also raises a few interesting questions about the software quality of other manufacturers. Apparently they ship bug free software (try explaining that to VW owners) or their software is just not getting a lot of scrutiny. Is Ford really that good at software or updating it? Or maybe the NHTSA is a bit selective with their scrutiny here? On a positive note, really nice of them to do free QA for Tesla.

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