Yeah I was talking about Google Vision or similar. Though USPS has been doing handwriting recognition since the 80's. I don't it got very good until the late 90's though.
The mandatory one, liability insurance, which pays out others' damages in case your car is in an accident and the driver of your car is found to be at fault. Base rates for those are by law based on the rate of payouts per car model and per owner's county at that insurance company. A multiplier makes the base rate more expensive or cheaper respectively for new drivers, accident-prone drivers or long-time accident-free drivers. No other external statistics are allowed to play a role.
The two non-mandatory ones are "Vollkasko" and "Teilkasko", which pay for damages your own car suffered from various factors like animals, weather, accidents, road conditions and stuff like that. Vollkasko even pays for accidents you caused yourself, Teilkasko only for some of the aforementioned things. In both, insurers are still required to do some classification by county, but they are allowed to factor in statistics about your car's repair cost.
But none of those will pay for your car just randomly breaking down and needing repairs, that is something you get a manufacturer's warranty for. And none of those is directly related to the mandatory inspections. I think I've read some statistics that driver behaviour and skill is also a large factor in why there are less accidents in Germany, at least compared to some regions of the world... But make of those what you will, that might as well be jingoism and often also comparing apples and oranges...
In Sweden some of faults can be covered if the mileage is low enough, usually the limit is between 120000 and 200000 km. Usually engine and tranmission is covered.
However, both aren't that trustworthy, just better than nothing, because:
The first one about road-side breakdowns is frequently gamed by car manufacturers, because in leasing and warranty contracts they often require the use of their own road-side assistance orgs, thereby bypassing ADAC. So the more expensive German manufacturers are definitely underrepresented there.
So generally Tesla Model 3/Y appears one of the best in that report...
I assume the denominator is cars registered with ADAC, rather than all cars in germany? Presumably that means those with lease contracts requiring another breakdown service wouldn't affect the stats?
> I assume the denominator is cars registered with ADAC, rather than all cars in germany? Presumably that means those with lease contracts requiring another breakdown service wouldn't affect the stats?
Not quite, the denominator is the number of road-side assistance calls they get.
ADAC has a driver membership system, where you get that assistance for free as part of your membership as a driver. You can still call them as a non-member, and I suppose those calls will factor in the statistics as well, but that is expensive, so it's rare. And you don't register your car with them, so they don't know what their members are driving, you just tell them your membership number and can get assistance for whatever car you are currently driving in.
Worn brake disks are a manufacturing problem. Nominally my VW needs new brake disks every 100Mm. Practically it needs new ones every 40Mm, because VW makes them from shitty steel that rusts and wears like hell, especially when there is salt on the roads in winter.
Some manufacturers use better steel and therefore have a longer disk lifetime.
I do drive to work almost every day, and I don't drive an electric car. So there is sufficient use.
And quite a few decades ago, people noticed that when you mix chromium, nickel, vanadium or things like that into your steel, it doesn't rust. Car manufacturers are just very slow in noticing.
TÜV is the largest such organisation in Germany and almost has a monopoly. The inspections themselves are colloquially even called "TÜV", even if you do it at some other org.
However, as others have written, there is still some huge bias in those numbers. Especially German brand car shops provide an inspection service, where they pre-check and repair the car before the official inspection. Many of those German brands are also very big on company leasing, to the point where almost nobody buys a new BMW, Mercedes or Audi privately, they either get a new one as a company car via company leasing, or they get a used leasing return car. All those leasing cars always have the aforementioned inspection service as part of the leasing package. So those numbers are to be taken with a huge huge grain of salt.
First of all TÜV isn't a single org but a shared brand of multiple independent companies.
And while "TÜV" is used colloquially for the mandatory car inspection in germany even all TÜV named companies together aren't anywhere near a monopoly:
all of them combined(!) have 37,5% market share in the german vehicle inspection market. The largest single org in that market is actually DEKRA with 32,5%.
People say "Ich bring mein Auto zum TÜV", but they actually mean "I'm gonna drop it at my dealership and let him inspect it by whatever company he has a deal with"
The report from the original article is not a general problem rate but more specific: TÜV does mandatory technical inspections every two years. In those inspections, only safety- and environment-critical problems are checked for, so e.g. brakes, rust on structural parts, high emissions, non-working lights. But there is a whole bunch of stuff that they don't check for, e.g. heating/cooling, GPS not working, doesn't charge/start sometimes, ...
So it's quite possible that both are true: Maybe ID4 has lots of non-safety and non-environment problems, so it is in the shop very often, but still rarely fails an official inspection.
A sample of one but ours did fail the inspection (suspension). It also experienced a complete shutdown of instrument panel on the motorway: not something you reproduce easily in a regular inspection but a pretty damn serious condition. Fail to unfold the mirrors/engage parking assistant or rearview camera happened dozens of times.
None of other owners I spoke to were particularly happy with theirs either.
I also experienced a shutdown and restart on an one-week-old Opel (but happened a decade ago). In one second everything was back online and working, but boy the adrenaline kick you get form that...
German situation is mostly/rarely/never. Small businesses have their DSL line where their cheapo router will announce an IPv6 prefix which almost all ISPs over here provide. Medium to large businesses usually have some braindead security policies that include switching off all IPv6 functionality in devices.
On our end, it's all electronic - we never print anything out. So yeah, on our side, "email with extra steps". But I have no idea how the mortgage companies handle it on their end.
Ink on paper, where I work. There have been court decisions that have seen Fax as "remote copying". And said that those remote copies only had any legal value if there was an actual paper original. Thus the workflow always has to involve paper that is then archived as paper in a folder...
I once had to print a form and fax to a company with a signature and the instructions said specifically that "signing with a computer and sending digitally is not allowed".
I just signed with macOS Preview, applied some random noise filter and used a one-off online fax service. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> Medium to large businesses usually have some braindead security policies
what's the argument behind that? are they scared they might configure their firewall bad and have no NAT to safe them from accidentally making all devices public?
It comes from the same place as "passwords expire every 30 days".
People don't understand something and just apply the most annoying rule possible.
The craziest one I saw in Germany was "cookies are allowed, localStorage is not", that was for our app. CTO overrode the CISO on the spot and called him an idiot for making rules he doesn't understand. Interesting day.
Usually there is no official justification given, just a list (in excel...) of security requirements that have to be ticked off. One of them is "Disable IPv6".
I've heard some ex-post justifications, make of them what you will: Existing infrastructure like firewalls, VPNs and routers might not be able to handle IPv6 properly. Address distribution in IPv6 is unpredictable. No inhouse knowledge of IPv6. Everything has an address in IPv6, so the whole internet can access it. No NAT in IPv6, so it is insecure. IPv6 makes things slow.
Yes, and the three western allies agreed to let their occupation zones form a German state. Which the Soviets opposed and had their occupation zone form an East German state, thus dividing Germany at their zone boundary. The Soviets did the dividing, the other allies did no such thing.
"Against Soviet protests, the two English-speaking powers pushed for a heightened economic collaboration between the different zones, and on 1 January 1947 the British and American zones merged to form the Bizone. Over the course of 1947 and early 1948, they began to prepare the currency reform that would introduce the Deutsche Mark and ultimately lead to the creation of an independent West German state.
When the Soviets learned about these plans, they claimed that they were in violation of the Potsdam Agreement, that obviously the Western powers were not interested in further regular four-power control of Germany and that under such circumstances the Allied Control Council had no further purpose." [0]
There is ample precendent for impounding the assets of hostile nations. The Soviets did it to Germany in WW2, so they cannot really claim that they are opposed to that practice.
The only reason why this seizure of russian money in Belgium might be a bad idea is reciprocity. Russia would of course then try to seize European assets in Russia.
And regarding ships, prize law is still internationally accepted and in effect. Ukraine can offer prize letters to privateers or foreign navies, allowing the seizure of Russian ships. Or they can seize ships themselves. When those ships are then in a Ukrainian or allied harbor, a Ukrainian admirality court then assigns ownership of the vessel and all goods to the ones who brought it up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prize_(law)
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