Good thing this has never happened to any other carmaker, right? Surely it would also have been HN front page news, especially if it affected thousands of cars!
> Ford is recalling 1.4 million vehicles because the steering wheels can become loose and even come off while driving.
> The automaker says it is aware of two accidents and one injury that may have been caused by the problem.
Of course steering wheels shouldn't fall off. But the comments here are already full of people under the impression that this incident proves Tesla is uniquely bad, and it's just silly. A few seconds Googling will tell you that most carmakers have had either isolated incidents or even widespread recalls of steering wheels that can fall off, or very similar problems such as the wheel disconnecting from the steering mechanism. Just on the front page of Google results I also see Mercedes and GM and Toyota. Turns out perfection in manufacturing hasn't been achieved yet, by anyone.
I used to work on error proofing software at an automotive assembly plant, and it turns out that error proofing steering wheel torque is hard.
Error proofing means at least two things in this context:
1. Making the operation hard to fail at, aka poka yoke (mistake proofing), sometimes called idiot proofing.
2. Work specification validation.
Both of these are difficult because the steering column has to be immobilized and then it has to be re-mobilized. This is not hard, per se, but it is just slightly more complicated than other assembly steps.
How does this happen? The validation mechanism and operator both have a type 2 error (false negative, failure to detect a fault) - they are not aware that some part of the tooling is not working or sensing correctly. Other things that can cause this: manual intervention to release a vehicle from the work cell due to excessive type 1 errors (false positive errors); repair work after the vehicle leaves the assembly line; off by one errors in vehicle tracking.
Although I do not have any articles to show, I know that from my personal experiences that "other" manufaturers will also not perform recalls when there are "generally known" issues.
It is my belief that they all have bean counters constantly looking at the stats and have some sort of recall threshold before anything is recalled.
I'm sure some companies are better than others though which also probably depends on the country.
Indeed, some 200,000 cars catch fire every year in the USA. Approximately zero of those make the news, unless it's a Tesla. So despite being 11 times less likely to catch fire, if you watch the news you might well conclude that only Teslas catch fire.
1. Tesla has electronic only locks in the rear seats of Model 3 and Model Y. Furthermore, the door handles to the front seats are electronic only, the mechanical override is hidden behind the speaker IIRC or under the floor.
2. Once the fire starts, the electronics fail to function, locking you inside of the car.
#1 combined with #2 means that Tesla vehicles are uniquely positioned to lock in and kill their victims. Even when there are people who are in the front seats, most people are ignorant to the location of the manual override, and thus get locked in for the fire.
Bonus points: it requires 10,000+ gallons of water to extinguish a Tesla Fire. Once that fire starts, they can't actually extinguish the flames.
> “Our investigation has determined that one of the victims was in the front passenger seat; one was in the back seat,” Mark Herman, a constable for Harris County Precinct 4, told KHOU, adding police were “100 percent certain that no one was in the driver’s seat.”
> Officials in Houston said the battery inside Tesla ignited after the collision, causing a fire that burned for four hours and required more than 30,000 gallons of water to put out.
Current theory is that the driver tried the front door, which failed to work. (Electronics failed). Driver was likely ignorant to the manual-override process. Driver moves to rear seats to try back seats, which has no manual override. At that point, the two die to the fire. (There's a pretty bad theory floating around the media that it was "driverless". A later story found some Ring doorbell footage showing the driver in the driver's seat, so I don't buy the "driverless" theory that Wash. Po pushes in that story)
The "try the front door / try the back door" thing has happened so many times it should be the default assumption when we see these burn-to-death situations with Tesla vehicles.
For at least the past few years the front and rear do indeed have mechanical releases. The front is easy to get, its right below the electronic button. The rear, at least on the Y, is not as obvious or easy to get to. Its under the doors storage mat. I believe the rear's has been updated recently but don't quote me. So not totally accurate for the first part.
Those aren't the same things though. You can extinguish a fire on a normal vehicle in many cases. However, it's pretty much impossible to extinguish once a serious fire in a Tesla gets going.
Whataboutism is lazy. This is notable on its own or in relation to other companies, otherwise it wouldn't hit the front page.
The major differences are that:
- Tesla has a well-documented history of sacrificing safety for factory throughput, including taping parts together and shipping parts that are out of tolerance
- Tesla's customer service in this (and, nowadays, all other) error is abysmal
- Elon Musk controls the outlet where this was first reported, and he has now shadow-banned the post (it's impossible to search for it)
Unless you have data to show that Tesla is uniquely bad here, your post comes off as nothing other than a smear, especially with the "whataboutism" epithet.
Ford recalls vehicles _on the chance_ that its steering wheel falls off. In contrast, Tesla steering wheels fall off, _but no recall has been announced_ yet.
This is a very different problem. Ford is proactively trying to prevent steering wheels from becoming a problem publicly. In contrast, Tesla waits for it to be a problem before issuing a recall.
Case in point: instead of showing a news article about Ford steering wheels falling off, they listed an article discussing a hypothetical "might fall off" recall. Do you see why these two stories are completely different?
EDIT: Case in point: how long do you think it will be before Tesla issues a recall over this? Can Tesla even track its manufacturing errors and which batch of vehicles are affected by this problem?
> Ford recalls vehicles _on the chance_ that its steering wheel falls off. In contrast, Tesla steering wheels fall off, _but no recall has been announced_ yet.
Seems like steering wheels had already fallen off before they issued the recall.
Multiple people have burned to death as those silly electronic locks fail and when the car catches on fire. Has there been any recall to fix this issue? No.
Multiple people have died as 'Full Self Driving' has collided into walls and trucks. Has there been a recall? No .
Multiple safety critical issues have hit this company over and over again, and they do nothing about it. I can say that Tesla will ignore this problem too.
We all know that the electronic locks fail when the battery explodes in flames. We also know that Tesla cars manual override is rather... difficult. But go on, research the issue on your own if you don't believe me. Try to figure out the manual overload yourself.
Seriously, it could save your life, so you really should look for it and train to use it.
And a LOT of these have the same issue. Car crashes, doors stop working. People don't know how to use the manual override and either burn to death, or break a window to escape.
There's been no recall, no safety notice, no nothing. This keeps happening over-and-over-and-over again. I don't know what the NHTSA is doing on this matter, but the number of cases continues to rise higher and higher.
So yes. When I hear "Tesla has another safety issue", I'm more inclined to believe that its Tesla's fault and they're covering something up. After all, they're obviously covering up this Fire + Door issue and have been for years.
> If Tesla not to be compared with other car companies
Because people burning to death while being trapped inside is rather terrifying. Regardless of what other car companies are doing.
If you need a "benchmark" to measure how bad that is I don't know what's wrong with you. But personally speaking, its not how I'd want to die, or how anyone else I know should die. My Tesla-loving friends included.
At some point, you need to stop comparing Tesla to other companies and start asking yourself: "Why do Tesla doors FAIL and lock their victims inside during a fire? Can this be fixed?"
2. Getting locked in a Tesla because they messed up the doors.
You've covered #1 with whataboutism, so I reject it as an answer. Please try again without whataboutism. And next time, try to also come up with a response to #2.
Having functional doors during an emergency is also very important, and Tesla fails at that. The combination of 1 and 2 causes fatalities.
And your comment is meaningless. Please provide a reference to the textbook that defines whataboutism. Right, you can't, because it's just word salad. The term is meant to make forum users disregard a statement by sneering at the commenter and generating social stigmatization. Looky here folks, we've got a whataboutist, ignore them. It's almost like the word "cromulant", it's just a placeholder word. It means nothing.
It includes many historical references, and an example from 1974 which may be the first use of the term; the definition given there (and throughout the article) is obviously applicable to modeless' original comment. It also includes a thoughtful defense of whataboutism, including rndmize's comment that sometimes it provides useful context.
Some commentators have defended the usage of whataboutism and tu quoque in certain contexts. Whataboutism can provide necessary context into whether or not a particular line of critique is relevant or fair, and behavior that may be imperfect by international standards may be appropriate in a given geopolitical neighborhood.[7] Accusing an interlocutor of whataboutism can also in itself be manipulative and serve the motive of discrediting, as critical talking points can be used selectively and purposefully even as the starting point of the conversation (cf. agenda setting, framing, framing effect, priming, cherry picking). The deviation from them can then be branded as whataboutism.
If this article is the "textbook" definition of Whataboutism, then perhaps I take back my statement. I find it quite unbiased and fair in its consideration of the use of "whataboutism" as a pejorative and manipulative bad-faith argumentation technique.
"Whataboutism" is the attempt to make something seem more acceptable because it's common (or at least not unique). It's a dismissal of valid criticism.
In this case, it doesn't matter if every company had a steering wheel recall. Tesla didn't and hasn't owned up to this mistake, and it's notably egregious even if other companies have had a similar issue.
> "Whataboutism" is the attempt to make something seem more acceptable because it's common (or at least not unique).
That's not what it is. Whataboutism is generally an effort to paint someone making an argument as hypocritical by citing other incidents that are similar and by drawing attention away from the original argument, eg. Republicans are bad because X; what about Democrats that do X?
The top comment isn't saying this is acceptable because other car companies do this. They're saying this is a manufacturing defect, and as is often the case when manufacturing items in the millions, defects happen. Mistakes get made. And unless the statistics of an incident are known, a single isolated data point tells us very little, and attempting to draw general conclusions from it is bad practice at best.
Further, I wouldn't expect to hear about recalls about steering wheels from other car companies (unless it was a very common issue), or incidents where their cars caught fire, or just crashes in general - and yet it seems articles crop up regularly about such events as they apply to Teslas. Going by media attention alone, one would expect Teslas to be 10x less reliable as any other car, which just doesn't seem to be the case.
> In this case, it doesn't matter if every company had a steering wheel recall. Tesla didn't and hasn't owned up to this mistake, and it's notably egregious even if other companies have had a similar issue.
Dude, it's been _one day_. Literally.
The Ford recall article notes "The automaker says it is aware of two accidents and one injury that may have been caused by the problem." So far for this case, we have one incident and no accidents. I'm genuinely curious how many incident reports Ford received before they decided to do the recall - but its pretty obvious its more than a single case.
It isn't whataboutism to expect the same standards to be applied to all car companies.
It's hard to have a reasonable discussion about Tesla or Musk here or anywhere in general. Some mix of emotions or conflict of interest or both is going to result in disjoint and irrational posts. I tried to move the discussion to data and fair comparisons in another thread but it only results in sneers and derision.
And I'm not a huge fan of Musk, especially his recent behavior with Twitter, but I try to be fair and data driven at least.
The problem is that more often than not, accusations of whataboutism are used against people pointing out unfair/invalid criticism that is not taking the a comprehensive view of the situation or agendas of interested parties into account.
A steering wheel should never fall off a car while it's driving. Period. Millions upon millions of cars have been sold and driven for hundreds of billions of miles without losing a steering wheel.
It's notable that a Tesla lost one, no Teslas have been recalled, and Tesla's support has been terrible/insane about this (and many other quality issues).
> agendas of interested parties into account
The Twitter OP's "agenda" was to buy an expensive car that had a securely-attached steering wheel.
I think given that Tesla is dominating the current automative news cycle with its announcement of a global price discount, interest in a story on a potential quality control issue is understandable:
Is there a database or something to lookup stats of car manufacturing failures? A family member of mine recently got a Model X and the back wheel came off while she was driving it on the highway. Never occurred to me that it might be an issue that happens with other manufacturers but would love to see the numbers.
It would have been if Ford fanatics had been everywhere preaching the superior technologies found in their Fords. IME even Ford owners are not very excited about the brand, there are some models (Raptor and Mustang mainly) enthusiasts but not to the degree when they buy $F stock and follow Ford's CEO Twitter.
> Ford is recalling 1.4 million vehicles because the steering wheels can become loose and even come off while driving.
> The automaker says it is aware of two accidents and one injury that may have been caused by the problem.
https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/14/news/companies/ford-steerin...
> Rivian recalls all of its vehicles for steering wheel troubles
https://www.pocnetwork.net/technology-news/rivian-recalls-al...
etc...
Of course steering wheels shouldn't fall off. But the comments here are already full of people under the impression that this incident proves Tesla is uniquely bad, and it's just silly. A few seconds Googling will tell you that most carmakers have had either isolated incidents or even widespread recalls of steering wheels that can fall off, or very similar problems such as the wheel disconnecting from the steering mechanism. Just on the front page of Google results I also see Mercedes and GM and Toyota. Turns out perfection in manufacturing hasn't been achieved yet, by anyone.