"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.
"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.