zlacker

>>heshie+(OP)
I've worked for a large OEM, dealing with a large Japanese megacorp that is not Mazda for about two years (actually Mazda was one of our customers too, but I didn't get to work with them directly). This does not amaze me anymore.

We spent months agonizing over an interior temperature sensor, which was only used to display the information to the user on a smartphone app. We built both the hardware and software, and it was offered as an add-on at the dealerships. After months of negotiations, after the hardware was already built and the packages assembles, they decided temperature sensors were too inaccurate (+/- 5 degrees F) to use, and that it could present a legal liability. Again, this was nothing else but displaying the information on the app - and the user could then make a decision whether to remote start the car to cool it or heat it (no automatic process took place either).

This was at the height of "unintended accelerator" issue in Toyotas, so everyone was walking on egg shells playing it ultra safe to not invite any more lawsuits.

What surprises me is that this culture of "playing it safe" remained to this day, some 10 years later (but maybe it shouldn't).

>>mirkul+Ek
Idk about everyone else but when it comes to anything running in my car, _anything_, there is no such thing as excessive "playing it safe". It's a 2 ton mass of steel barreling down the highway at 70+ mph next to other unpredictable 2 ton masses, please for the love of God, fight to maintain that culture of "playing it safe", regardless of what you're working on and for what purpose.

>>wutwut+Zx
Would you be willing to pay millions for your car to make it safer? The pope has bullet proof glass, different body materials can protect your life. How would you define excessive?

>>ipaddr+JD
R&D is already baked into the final price of everything we buy so that has no argument.

And the bullet proof glass thing I shouldn't even respond to because of the ridiculous extreme you've had to go to, trying to argue against me saying the companies should play it safe, but I'll reply this one time. I'm not asking the car company to protect me from an assassin's bullets. That is not something they control. I'm asking them to "play it safe" when developing components for the car so the car doesn't kill me while I'm in the car. They are responsible for their domain and are not producing armored vehicles for war time. So ridiculous lol

>>wutwut+RJ
Your comment was nothing is too excessive. The truth is, everything has a level where we try to balance cost/safety. Having Mazda spend millions more puts the base stickier price up. It might be $100, $500, $5000, $50,000 $5,000,000. How much more are you willing to pay and if you really cared wouldn't you buy a Volvo over a Mazda?

>>ipaddr+n31
This really isn’t helping. Cars are very safe at the moment, with the driver being the key factor in accidents. They are very safe at the current price point. GP was arguing we should keep fighting to keep them safe. That means we keep doing whatever it is we’re doing, which is making cars safe, at a reasonable cost.

>>xctr94+w91
Are cars really that safe?

I mean, safer relative to what they used to be, yes.

But compared other modes of transportation, not so sure.

>>kakwa_+fE1
People roll their cars on the highway and walk away these days. That wasn't a thing that happened in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and even 90s. Some people don't survive, but a vast majority do. You're instantly surrounded by airbags from all sides these days and have a sort of forcefield to absorb the energy of the crash so you don't have to. The same concept has safely dropped rovers onto other planets. Engines nosedive downward into the ground instead of back into the firewall and then into your legs, crumple zones take the impact and absorb the energy instead of transferring it through the solid steel bumper, solid steel frame, solid steal dashboard, solid steal steering column, and solid steel steering where, where your skull is next in line to absorb that energy which up to that point has hardly dissipated. In the 60s a fender bender often messed up people's necks for life, yet people today can often flip their car and walk away with scratches, never to complain about any life long issues stemming from the accident. Automatic collision detechion systems can notice a stopped object and apply the brakes faster than our meat cpus can even process the eyeball input and notice what is going on, and then dealing with the latency of brain to muscle signals and muscle speed and accuracy. When you're about to hit a brick wall at highway speeds, 250ms more of brakes on full can shed an insane amount of speed/momentum/energy. And let's not forget about all the people who text and drive who would rear end or cross the lane and hit someone head on if it wasn't for collision detection stopping them or lane keep yanking the car back into the lane it should be in. Cars are safer than they have ever been.