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Comment by tomatotomato37 | Hacker News Reader

The average amount of residential fires in the UK between 2017-2018 that actually required rescue services is around 83,000[0], so only 75 extra a year does seem a bit excessive to do a full recall on; I feel a stop-sale order until the problem was resolved and saving full recalls for very dangerous items would have been a better choice

[0]https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

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This item causes a house fire while off. What threshold do you choose for "very dangerous"?

Also, it looks like they tried that, and Whirlpool was unable to do a proper repair, so here we are.

Causing more house fires? Probably 1% of products sold/in use would be a good criteria

I have a hard time parsing this. Do you mean no more than 1% of the sold product should cause a house fire?

Anyway, 75 house fires per year from a certain product is a pretty big number. Comparing this with the total number of house fires is misleading, since house fires have many different causes. I don't have any numbers, but my gut tells me that if you'd compare this with the average number of house fires caused by sudden electrical failures from household machines while being turned off, this would be a pretty big outlier.

1% would be an insane failure rate for something this dangerous. Over half the households in the UK own driers [1] and there are 27.7 million households in the UK [2]. If 1% of driers were catching fire we would be seeing 138,500 extra house fires a year! Even 0.001% is too high.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/289140/tumble-dryers-in-... [2] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

Nevermind that your average household probably has at least 10 things hooked into their electrical system. A 1% failure rate for all of them would be rather insane.

You appear to have a pretty low quality requirement - do you really think it's fine to sell goods you know can catch fire in normal operation, so long as "only" 75 a year threaten people's lives??

Good for you I guess, but IMO any product having a defect that risks lives, under standard operation, due to engineering defects, should be recalled.

My 13yo car has its third recall on one issue -- but it causes fires; that's a valid recall.

Each of those _750_ fires is a potential death of a family. I think it qualifies as very dangerous.

The fire report states that it's an internal wiring fault in the machine, and all of this was caused - approximately £8,000 worth of damage - when the machine was turned off

This doesn't seem to be the average fire from not cleaning the lint trap though, so may not be a fair comparison.

I guess we need to ask: compared to what? They sold ~5mil units, and recall may affect 500k still in use. So that's a hit of 10% of the revenue from these driers.

If they had 10% profit margin on these driers, that would wipe out that. That's probaly all.

That vs. more people dying.

I completely agree with you, but it's fascinating to compare the attitude here vs. how people respond when simple, proven life-saving measures are proposed for roadways, for example even things as basic as leading pedestrian signals, pedestrian scrambles, road diets, smaller turn radiuses, banning RTOR, etc.

With even the hint of someone in a car being inconvenienced, a cry goes up and the whole thing is dead in the water.

Meanwhile close to 20 pedestrians are killed in the US every single day. We call these collisions "accidents", and throw up our hands about them because how can you prevent an act of god, right?

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