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Tesla recalls 1.8 million cars because their hoods can open while driving (arstechnica.com)

submitted 3 months ago by ForgottenFlux to c/technology

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The electric car manufacturer Tesla had to issue a massive recall this month to fix faulty hood latches that can open while its cars are driving. The problem affects more than 1.8 million cars, which means it's slightly smaller than the recall in December that applied to more than 2 million Teslas.

The problem, according to the official National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Part 573 safety recall report, affects model year 2021–2024 Model 3s (built between September 21, 2020, and June 2, 2024), model year 2021–2024 Model Ss (built between January 26, 2021, and July 15, 2024), model year 2021–2024 Model Xs (built between August 18, 2021, and July 15, 2024), and model year 2020–2024 Model Ys (built between January 9, 2020, and July 15, 2024).

The problem first became apparent to Tesla in March of this year after complaints about unintended hood opening from Chinese customers. By April, it had identified the problem as deformation of the hood latch switch, "which could prevent the customer from being notified about an open hood state."

Although the problem is with the hood latch, as with many Tesla safety recalls, the problem can be fixed with an over-the-air software patch. The new software is able to detect if the hood is open and, if so, will display a warning to the driver to alert them to stop their vehicle and secure the hood.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago

Beyond any issues with the owner of the company, these cars have multiple dangerous issues.

You cannot treat a company that makes physical stuff that can endanger lives the same way you treat a software company that makes a leisure activity platform.

Iterative design for a purely software environment is way more forgiving than iterative design for physical hardware or even software that interacts with physical hardware. You can profoundly fuck up the backend for a website and take the whole thing down until you could roll back to last known good production, you won't kill anyone, but you'll make the line go down temporarily.

If you profoundly fuck up an iteration on an embedded vehicle system and don't catch it because you don't respect safety regulation or existing engineering norms you can and will kill people.