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38,000 people die annually in auto accidents. Car manufacturers should never get away with it. Two incidents with 200+ fatalities indeed is tragic, but automobi

38,000 people die annually in auto accidents. Car manufacturers should never get away with it. Two incidents with 200+ fatalities indeed is tragic, but automobiles are nearly two orders of magnitude worse in death counts. We should be 100x more serious about automobiles.

tjungblut 6y ago
How many of them die because the car is malfunctioning?
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
  Some non-zero amount, though not 100%. But if a life is a life, and we can only lobby politicians for so many things, we could probably reduce more deaths by having higher standards for licensing. And our lobbying efforts could save magnitudes more lives.
  - doix 6y ago
    What really shocked me when speaking to my american colleagues is that you guys have no equivalent of an "MOT". In the UK, for a car to be road legal it needs to hava passed some safety checks. From what I understood, that doesn't exist over there? Anyone can go, buy a $100 car from some guy on craigslist and drive it around. I'd wager that makes a big difference to road fatalities. That and the drunk driving. I guess it depends on the place, but in Austin it was awful. I was out drinking with some guys from work, we had maybe 6 beers? Then they all walked back to the office, got their cars and drove home. It made me much more paranoid about crossing the road.
    - jfk13 6y ago
      > you guys have no equivalent of an "MOT" It depends on the state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_Unit...
- kungito 6y ago
  I'd say a more fair phrasing would be "how many of the die from reasons out of their control"? At first I thought this would even out the car and plane fatalities, but actually you can greatly reduce your risk in plane fatalities by avoiding 737 Max while you cannot know who is going to drive into your lane
FriendlyNormie 6y ago
Nice whataboutism, faggot. No one’s talking about cars.
wombatmobile 6y ago
Are you saying 38,000 automobile deaths are caused by defects that the manufacture neglected to fix or warn customers about? Of course not. So that's a false parallel i.e. whataboutism.
- eecc 6y ago
  Uh, isn’t “whataboutism” more like: replying with a totally different subject that supposedly has more merit to discussion? False parallel feels a different thing to me
  - wombatmobile 6y ago
    I’m not sure. Perhaps one is a descendant of the other? I think whataboutism is like She says The storming of the Capitol was wrong because people died and our institution’s citadel was trashed And he says What about the BLM protests - xxx people died and yyy buildings were vandalised at a cost of zzz millions It seems to be some kind of parallel, but not to draw an analogy - rather to excuse an action by making a distraction out of a superficially similar form(?)
    - eecc 6y ago
      Hmm, seems like your take is more correct: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
tgv 6y ago
While the numbers don't lie, your response is in another domain. Are these 38k deaths (which is USA only) caused by manufacturer error, preferably the same model? If not, you're polluting any meaningful discussion.
krsdcbl 6y ago
I think you are conflating causes here. A faulty aircraft where design issues led to a rare incident is something completely different than the quite common traffic deaths mostly originating from asverse conditions an reckless driving of a traffic participant. Traffic accidents are not mainly caused by a certain car model being sold with faulty breaks, and airplane crashes are incredibly rare occurances.
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
  I don't think it's a conflation because it's a moral question and a judgment of how we view death. I know multiple people that have died in car accidents. I know nobody who's died in a plane crash. Even if the FAA made the wrong call here, why do we give outsized influence and attention to events that cause relatively few deaths? In other words: what is the greater moral tragedy, losing 40,000 of your fellow citizens at the hands of aggressive or uneducated or unskilled drivers, or 400 deaths largely due to corporate cost cutting? My mental framework suggests we should optimize for addressing maximal number of deaths, but we rarely make that choice.
  - croes 6y ago
    400 because they grounded the 737 Max. Imagine a car sometimes driving to left if you steer right. Would you blame the driver or the manufacturer. BTW count the hours people drive and compare them to the hours people fly and than look at the death rate.
    - notahacker 6y ago
      > Imagine a car sometimes driving to left if you steer right. Would you blame the driver or the manufacturer. We don't need to imagine this. There's a car called a Tesla which sometimes unexpectedly and fatally decides to steer in a different direction, and its management invariably blame the driver. Weirdly, HNers not only generally don't want Tesla's entire management and design team to be fired, they actually tend towards defending their approach... Edit: would love it if the people who apparently disagree could make some arguments why Tesla's fatality-inducing electronic driver support system deserves a different response to Boeing's
ramraj07 6y ago
It is not just a numbers game. The suits in the offices of Boeing and FAA wantonly misled and hid data that undermined the safety of a plane which was clearly a bad idea to begin with. If a similar incident is uncovered in the auto industry they should also be held accountable to the same extent. Automakers are constantly forced to recall their cars for faults which are not even deliberate so it looks like that system is at least somewhat working. We cannot excuse Boeing with such whataboutism especially safety is at stake. Flying on an absolute sense is an insane activity. As Louis CK put it, you're "sitting on a chair, IN THE SKY!" The only reason we take it for granted is the Stellar safety record (which is even better than cars?). If all you do is just match the safety profile of ground transportation, the optics of the combination of perception and real events would just grind this industry down. In some ways it's actually bad for the industry in the long term but these suits and their next quarter bonuses don't care about that! Only the public can.
gobrewers14 6y ago
> 38,000 people die annually in auto accidents... This argument is nonsensical. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_as_bad_as https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_as_bad_as
ulfw 6y ago
The vast majority of car crashes are user error, not manufacturer fault. If it were the latter, you bet there would be inquiries.
kwanbix 6y ago
That is totally different. Boing did lots of bad decisions to try to fight the Airbus Neo which was much more fuel efficient than their current airplanes. All of the decisions led to huge changes on the MCAS. But basically nobody was told about it, so pilots didn't know how to react to the changes. I won't repeat the whole thread, but you can check here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1106934362531155974.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1106934362531155974.html
BelenusMordred 6y ago
> 200+ fatalities It was 355 people killed plus one on the response dive team for JT610.
tialaramex 6y ago
Most car accidents are private vehicle use. So it makes sense to compare those against GA (General Aviation, ie not commercial) accidents. The accidents are much more similar, both in frequency (they happen all the time, with little public interest) and causes. People fly their planes while drunk or ill, they fly planes that haven't been properly maintained, they fly when the weather is awful and it's recommended not to, they don't have good plans for what they'll do if anything goes wrong, they haven't practised skills they know they might need... and most of the time they came back down safe. But not always. When people say "Plane crash" they're normally thinking about Scheduled Aviation, at the far end of the safety categories from GA. If you bought tickets to go from one place to another at a particular time, that's scheduled aviation, the aeroplanes used, the crews flying them, even the company operating them is far more closely regulated and as you'd expect the result is far greater safety. I'd suggest comparing these accidents to bus crashes. A crash in which a greyhound smashes into a gorge and everybody dies would make the TV news, just as a crashed jetliner would. Like the plane, that bus was required to be properly maintained, its driver underwent training including periodic refreshers, and the company operating it is under much more scrutiny than some random guy in a pick-up.

tjungblut 6y ago

How many of them die because the car is malfunctioning?

JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
Some non-zero amount, though not 100%. But if a life is a life, and we can only lobby politicians for so many things, we could probably reduce more deaths by having higher standards for licensing. And our lobbying efforts could save magnitudes more lives.
- doix 6y ago
  What really shocked me when speaking to my american colleagues is that you guys have no equivalent of an "MOT". In the UK, for a car to be road legal it needs to hava passed some safety checks. From what I understood, that doesn't exist over there? Anyone can go, buy a $100 car from some guy on craigslist and drive it around. I'd wager that makes a big difference to road fatalities. That and the drunk driving. I guess it depends on the place, but in Austin it was awful. I was out drinking with some guys from work, we had maybe 6 beers? Then they all walked back to the office, got their cars and drove home. It made me much more paranoid about crossing the road.
  - jfk13 6y ago
    > you guys have no equivalent of an "MOT" It depends on the state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_Unit...
kungito 6y ago
I'd say a more fair phrasing would be "how many of the die from reasons out of their control"? At first I thought this would even out the car and plane fatalities, but actually you can greatly reduce your risk in plane fatalities by avoiding 737 Max while you cannot know who is going to drive into your lane

FriendlyNormie 6y ago

Nice whataboutism, faggot. No one’s talking about cars.

wombatmobile 6y ago

Are you saying 38,000 automobile deaths are caused by defects that the manufacture neglected to fix or warn customers about? Of course not. So that's a false parallel i.e. whataboutism.

eecc 6y ago
Uh, isn’t “whataboutism” more like: replying with a totally different subject that supposedly has more merit to discussion? False parallel feels a different thing to me
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  I’m not sure. Perhaps one is a descendant of the other? I think whataboutism is like She says The storming of the Capitol was wrong because people died and our institution’s citadel was trashed And he says What about the BLM protests - xxx people died and yyy buildings were vandalised at a cost of zzz millions It seems to be some kind of parallel, but not to draw an analogy - rather to excuse an action by making a distraction out of a superficially similar form(?)
  - eecc 6y ago
    Hmm, seems like your take is more correct: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

tgv 6y ago

While the numbers don't lie, your response is in another domain. Are these 38k deaths (which is USA only) caused by manufacturer error, preferably the same model? If not, you're polluting any meaningful discussion.

krsdcbl 6y ago

I think you are conflating causes here. A faulty aircraft where design issues led to a rare incident is something completely different than the quite common traffic deaths mostly originating from asverse conditions an reckless driving of a traffic participant. Traffic accidents are not mainly caused by a certain car model being sold with faulty breaks, and airplane crashes are incredibly rare occurances.

JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
I don't think it's a conflation because it's a moral question and a judgment of how we view death. I know multiple people that have died in car accidents. I know nobody who's died in a plane crash. Even if the FAA made the wrong call here, why do we give outsized influence and attention to events that cause relatively few deaths? In other words: what is the greater moral tragedy, losing 40,000 of your fellow citizens at the hands of aggressive or uneducated or unskilled drivers, or 400 deaths largely due to corporate cost cutting? My mental framework suggests we should optimize for addressing maximal number of deaths, but we rarely make that choice.
- croes 6y ago
  400 because they grounded the 737 Max. Imagine a car sometimes driving to left if you steer right. Would you blame the driver or the manufacturer. BTW count the hours people drive and compare them to the hours people fly and than look at the death rate.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    > Imagine a car sometimes driving to left if you steer right. Would you blame the driver or the manufacturer. We don't need to imagine this. There's a car called a Tesla which sometimes unexpectedly and fatally decides to steer in a different direction, and its management invariably blame the driver. Weirdly, HNers not only generally don't want Tesla's entire management and design team to be fired, they actually tend towards defending their approach... Edit: would love it if the people who apparently disagree could make some arguments why Tesla's fatality-inducing electronic driver support system deserves a different response to Boeing's

ramraj07 6y ago

It is not just a numbers game. The suits in the offices of Boeing and FAA wantonly misled and hid data that undermined the safety of a plane which was clearly a bad idea to begin with. If a similar incident is uncovered in the auto industry they should also be held accountable to the same extent. Automakers are constantly forced to recall their cars for faults which are not even deliberate so it looks like that system is at least somewhat working. We cannot excuse Boeing with such whataboutism especially safety is at stake. Flying on an absolute sense is an insane activity. As Louis CK put it, you're "sitting on a chair, IN THE SKY!" The only reason we take it for granted is the Stellar safety record (which is even better than cars?). If all you do is just match the safety profile of ground transportation, the optics of the combination of perception and real events would just grind this industry down. In some ways it's actually bad for the industry in the long term but these suits and their next quarter bonuses don't care about that! Only the public can.

gobrewers14 6y ago

> 38,000 people die annually in auto accidents... This argument is nonsensical. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_as_bad_as https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_as_bad_as

ulfw 6y ago

The vast majority of car crashes are user error, not manufacturer fault. If it were the latter, you bet there would be inquiries.

kwanbix 6y ago

That is totally different. Boing did lots of bad decisions to try to fight the Airbus Neo which was much more fuel efficient than their current airplanes. All of the decisions led to huge changes on the MCAS. But basically nobody was told about it, so pilots didn't know how to react to the changes. I won't repeat the whole thread, but you can check here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1106934362531155974.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1106934362531155974.html

BelenusMordred 6y ago

> 200+ fatalities It was 355 people killed plus one on the response dive team for JT610.

tialaramex 6y ago

Most car accidents are private vehicle use. So it makes sense to compare those against GA (General Aviation, ie not commercial) accidents. The accidents are much more similar, both in frequency (they happen all the time, with little public interest) and causes. People fly their planes while drunk or ill, they fly planes that haven't been properly maintained, they fly when the weather is awful and it's recommended not to, they don't have good plans for what they'll do if anything goes wrong, they haven't practised skills they know they might need... and most of the time they came back down safe. But not always. When people say "Plane crash" they're normally thinking about Scheduled Aviation, at the far end of the safety categories from GA. If you bought tickets to go from one place to another at a particular time, that's scheduled aviation, the aeroplanes used, the crews flying them, even the company operating them is far more closely regulated and as you'd expect the result is far greater safety. I'd suggest comparing these accidents to bus crashes. A crash in which a greyhound smashes into a gorge and everybody dies would make the TV news, just as a crashed jetliner would. Like the plane, that bus was required to be properly maintained, its driver underwent training including periodic refreshers, and the company operating it is under much more scrutiny than some random guy in a pick-up.