I’ve to confess, the reason behind the Nationwide Freeway Site visitors Security Administration (NHTSA)’s newest “recall” of Tesla automobiles is a bit of foolish: “A visible warning indicator whose letters’ font measurement is smaller than ⅛-inch, as prescribed in FMVSS Nos. 105 and 135, might scale back the motive force’s detection of it when illuminated, growing the danger of a collision.”
Translated: A font on Tesla’s touchscreen show is just too small.
In line with the NHTSA, the tiny warning signal for the automaker’s brake system might impede individuals’s potential to see it. The worldwide customary for that textual content is 3.2 millimeters, and something lower than that might pose a security threat, they declare.
The recall, which impacts 2.2 million automobiles, together with the Cybertruck, Mannequin X, Mannequin Y SUV, and Mannequin S, is definitely fixable. All it requires is an easy software program replace over the air (OTA). This recall is just not a recall in earnest—nobody must convey their automotive into the store; it’s a two-line code patch that poses much less actual hazard than an iPhone zero-day safety bug.
However whereas it’s not essentially the most dire of flubs (that award would go to Tesla’s many more serious issues), it’s one more signal of the automaker’s well-established lack of attention to detail and poor design.
Simply too many little (and large) issues
It’s a seemingly endless record at this level. I’ve misplaced depend of Tesla’s remembers, and I simply can’t be bothered to maintain hitting “next page” on this website. From the beginning, Musk appeared to make arbitrary design and manufacturing choices, like sourcing consumer-grade screens and electronics that couldn’t survive the acute environmental situations that vehicles undergo (these screens, after all, failed, which prompted an actual recall program that reached all the way to China and an investigation by the NHTSA and Germany’s Federal Motor Transport Authority.
Musk often points out that we should always cease calling these small points “remembers,” and on this case, I agree. Maybe we should always simply name them “one more nail in Tesla’s popularity,” or “one more signal of what occurs whenever you supply overpriced automobiles with bland design and crappy development requirements,” or simply “one more name to get your act collectively already, Elon.”
