Outcomes have to be truly and utterly fucked for "new" types of problems to be noticed in the automotive industry. Take the Toyota Unintended Acceleration case, where completely negligent software quality took over a decade and at least 89 lives to be noticed and (partially) rectified.
Regulators have keen noses for very particular types of issues and rely heavily on manufacturer judgements on a lot of the rest. Issues that aren't in any of those fairly narrow categories need to be extremely public or extremely egregious to attract their notice.
I’ve read into the Toyota case in the past and it doesn’t seem like it was that obvious of a regulatory failure, where you could come to such a conclusion.
Did I miss some good article covering it? Because everything I’ve read with the benefit of retrospect has been pretty critical of a lot the alleged ‘cases’ reported in that 89 number.
Are you sure that’s the example you want to use for pre-emptive regulatory failure? And do you think Tesla could demonstrated failures at a similar rate (assuming they were legit) and get away with it? Because I dont
I think it's a good example. Regulators had failed to note the issue despite years of reports (even considering the typical noise). NHTSA closed multiple investigations on the subject and even downplayed their findings when the investigative reports were released.
I used it as an example mainly because it's so public and the underlying causes were so egregious, not to make a specific comparison with Tesla's behavior.
I've actually filed whistleblower reports in the past (not at companies I've admitted a public relationship with on this account, if you want to check) that didn't lead to anything as far as I'm aware. The bar for investigation is apparently higher than my personal limits.
Somewhat related: I read into the case about a year ago and was shocked at how little coverage there is. There isn’t even a dedicated Wikipedia article — there’s only a one paragraph summary on the general article “Sudden Unintended acceleration” that covers all causes and prominent cases. 89 people died, and Toyota knew about the problem for years! Not only did they not do anything, they hid it. I just don’t get why more people didn’t talk about it. It’s not like it all happened in the distant past — Toyota was fined by Justice dept in 2014!
While that might be the case, Toyota has been found very negligent in how they develop software. It's an epidemic in the industry.
I think OP is just marveling at how so much can be so obviously wrong, and yet not garner attention and criticism. They should be exposed when they audit the software process, and really taken to task.
I think OP might be acting a little unrealistic, in that it seems like the world just works this way. However it's quite shocking to see the level of carelessness that can go into critical software.
Regulators have keen noses for very particular types of issues and rely heavily on manufacturer judgements on a lot of the rest. Issues that aren't in any of those fairly narrow categories need to be extremely public or extremely egregious to attract their notice.