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).
Never underestimate the ability of a manufacturer to select subpar parts to save 25 cents on the BOM and spend 6 figures elsewhere trying to fix the resulting issues though.
Scientific sensors are highly accurate and can also be small, but you have a steep cost increase of course.
One of the problems is the heat from the device itself, as well as limited airflow creating localized hotspots.
If you are only concerned about a 20 or so degree temperature range it's not an issue, but if you are trying to read over a 100 degree range, you'll want to account for non-linearity as well.
Also, accurate and precise to 10ths of a degree isn't really attainable unless you do fancy math as the sensor will heat each time you read it. The idea is to take multiple readings and average them but unless you are accounting for the heating of the sensor, your numbers will be garbage.
This is for consumer grade sub $50 sensors. Of course you can go fancier but you have to pay for it.
What is it about that device (or similar) that would put it out of scope?
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
> there is no such thing as excessive "playing it safe"
As you noted in your other comment:
> 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.
As in the old adage in computing ("the only unhackable computer is one that isn't connected to anything"), there's no way to ensure that the components of a car don't fail, even while in routine use. There is only more or less likely that they won't fail, and of course, less and less likely to fail is more and more expensive.
We might say that the only uncrashable car is one that sits in the garage and never goes anywhere. Obviously, that would be playing it safe excessively, since it would defeat the purpose of having a car to begin with. But what about less obvious cases? Toyota recalled millions of cars for their "unintended acceleration" issue. The merits of that particular case aside, how much more would someone pay for a Corolla that would be progressively less likely to have safety issues? At some point before infinity, it would be considered excessive.
I think the sliding scale of how safe is playing it too safe is a discussion very much worth having.
So good thing it's connected to the internet and has four screens.
Not any of my cars that I've owned
And it also depends what exactly you want to measure: air, motor or inside temperature? People might get confused. And inside temperature might differ a lot: behind the windscreen it might be a lot hotter than at the floor.
I mean, safer relative to what they used to be, yes.
But compared other modes of transportation, not so sure.
This comment was meant for the normal folks who spend a lot of time in our vehicles and are willing to accept a level of risk that comes along with having some sense of comfort.
But that was not my point.
At the end of the day, no matter how well it's built, a car is a several tons lump of steel launched at significant speed. It's an inherently deadly machine.
Having a lapse of attention while driving a car? you might easily cause a someone to die.
Having the same lapse on a bike? you might cause some broken bones.
Having the same lapse while walking? you are good for some "Oh... I'm sorry".
I forget the term for this, but it’s the same as me stating I like pancakes and you coming at me saying I hate waffles, when I wasn’t talking about waffles at any point. Those types of arguments are insane and I won’t engage with them. I wasn’t saying those things, I’m not defending against your claims that I did.
After Fukushima we were asked to provide specifications for acceptable operating environment radiation levels, after some negotiation they relented and gave us a figure we could test at, so engineers drove hardware to a spot with high background radiation and ran it for a couple of days off a generator to test.
The Japanese customers also insisted that each display on the hardware be the same shade of white, so they would all look nice in a datacenter, so our LCD displays have specifically graded white LEDs.
So yes, the line was very obvious because these are events that happen in real life, risk that you say you wanted to eliminate by absolutely playing it safe: "_anything_, there is no such thing as excessive 'playing it safe'"
I can only assume that your original comment was reactionary and hyperbolic, but then got upset over where that kind of hyperbole lead in the past.
Strange how HNs assume what country others reside in and apply their opinions, projecting them even, onto anything possible, whether or not the thing they are applying them to is at all related to what they reply with, and how they like to put words into the mouths of others with absolutely zero context to be able to make such assumptions, and are in denial about the ignorant-like state of their psyche and daily life as an idiot.