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Comment by everlost | Hacker News Reader

Is it normal to issue a recall for a problem that has not been reliably reproducible?

If it's in a safety sensitive area, definitely. As soon as you know how to deal with a potential issue, the liability clock starts ticking, and so it should be.

And if you've just started to get the public to trust you/any slight issue is a PR timebomb.

In another comment you said they're "fighting for trust" and here you say they've just started to get the public to trust them. What is this referring to? In terms of safety, Tesla seems to be extremely trusted, and has been for a while now.

Tesla has a big and very vocal group of fanboys (of which I am one!), many of whom are also part of the "tech crowd" - therefore it may seem, from reading HN or Reddit, that Tesla is universally loved. But for GenPop, it's just a new car company making these weird things that are "electric cars", led by some guy they probably haven't heard much about. People don't trust electric cars yet, and don't consider Tesla to be a trusted brand.

Well I think they are fighting for trust, and they will be for a long time.

As the other commenter says, in these circles, Tesla is very well trusted. Out in the world though, there are still a lot of people who associate Teslas with spontaneous combustion. Even if that same person would say that they're "probably safe" or some similar hedged assessment.

I think I've heard people mention the fires once or twice, but they also seem to be aware that it involved exceptional circumstances and that no lives were at risk. And yes, I've talked about the car with a lot of people outside the tech community too.

I think in terms of safety, Tesla is more associated with things like blowing out the NHTSA rating system.

Or a high-media-attention sensitive area.

Given that the way to check (yank hard on the lap belt) is simple, issuing the recall might serve the additional purpose of determining how widespread the problem actually is. There will probably be (in fact probably already are) numerous posts on teslamotorsclub.com and reddit.com/r/teslamotors saying "no problem found here."

Yes, ever since they starting fining the crap out of auto companies.

Auto companies have been preemptively recalling because recall is cheaper in the long runs than fines.

In fact rules and regulations for auto is actually a good example of government doing their job. Ralph Nader really did push real safety on cars in general.

Yes. See the Takata airbag recall (ongoing).

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