Comment by gfwilliams | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gfwilliams | Hacker News Reader

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I'll probably get flamed, but...

I'm shocked that everyone here is so against GM on this.

Given the complexity of a car and all the things that could go wrong, this is a very minor issue. The brakes still work (no ABS though), steering still works (it's just harder to turn), and lights still work. It basically turns into a car that's 20 years older, not a coffin on wheels.

The driver also knew there was a problem, wasn't happy with it, but still drove her car regardless and then wasn't able to cope when it happened again. She wasn't forced to drive it.

Maybe it's because I tend to drive older cars, but I'm all too aware that they're machines and they break. I've had all kinds of things fail when driving and I've had to try and cope with them safely. Luckily I have, but if I hadn't been so lucky I wouldn't blame the car manufacturer.

100 years ago you could get killed by all kinds of things and it was more or less just accepted - why are we now at the stage where a switch that's a bit too easy to turn is the cause of all this blame?

If you rode around in a 2005 Cobalt that had these issues you would be shocked each time you lost control of your vehicle. There's another service bulletin that isn't mentioned in this article about inadequate insulation around the transmission computer wiring harness. In addition to the unwanted shut downs, the automatic transmission would sometimes go AWOL in the rain. Have you ever tried to drive an automatic when the transmission computer has bad grounds? It's horrifying. This car didn't kill my GF, but it tried more than a few times.

Can't tell if this is supposed to be sarcasm.

I think the coverup or moral dilution at GM stands to be pretty damn awful.

engineering a failure situation and not playing out how it's most dangerous scenarios might end is pretty bad. I don't think anyone would drive a car over 20 mph if they knew it would shut off and literally have to "cope" with the stress and impending accident and hope to manually steer the car to safety.

I'm shocked you don't hold manufacturers to a higher standard.

It's not sarcasm, I'm just very surprised that everyone's opinion is so one-sided about this.

I think if you put yourself in the engineer's position, he probably didn't believe that having a switch that was a bit easier to turn would lead to anything more than mild inconvenience.

I think if GM honestly thought this would cause even one death they would have changed the lock barrels. Even if you ignore the human side, the potential costs damages from something like this would totally outweigh the cost of changing them.

Did it kill somebody? Did someone at GM know it could potentially kill somebody, but ignore it?

What do you think you're defending, then?

They knew it was an issue. Did they know it was going to kill someone? I'm not sure.

I guess a lot of people here are software engineers...

If you have a button in your phone app that's a bit slow to make something happen, you might put off a fix for it in order to ship early.

What if someone's using their phone (maybe illegally) while driving, they're distracted by the 'faulty' button and then they hit and kill a cyclist.

Would you then responsible for that cyclists's death?

I'm just trying to think 'what if I were an automotive engineer?'. Thinking of all the things in a car you could blame for not being absolutely perfect, it seems like an impossible job.

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