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I kept thinking of this scene from the movie Fight Club: Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential lo

I kept thinking of this scene from the movie Fight Club: Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one. Business woman on plane: Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents? Narrator: You wouldn't believe. Business woman on plane: Which car company do you work for? Narrator: A major one.

hef19898 4y ago
Totally ignoring all recalls car companies are legally required to do, aka those recalls in which the companies have no say in whatsoever. It makes for a good dialogue in a movie so.
Johnny555 4y ago
That makes fun movie dialog, but I don't think the car company decides on their own whether or not to do a safety recall. The NHTSA can force them to do a recall for a serious issue if the manufacturer doesn't do it voluntarily. The NHTSA usually finds out about defects by owners filing directly with the NHTSA, so it doesn't take direct cooperation from the manufacturer to start an investigation.
- rtkwe 4y ago
  In the early stages or sufficiently low levels of B they can. The NHTSA doesn't investigate every crash like the FAA does for plane crashes.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    The NTSB has a much larger role than the FAA in plane crash investigations.
    - rtkwe 4y ago
      True I knew in the moment I wasn't quite right about the exact agency. The core point stands though imo, car crashes don't receive the same scrutiny airplane crashes do in most cases.
- mywittyname 4y ago
  It still takes people being injured or dying over many years to find out about a flaw that was known to several levels of engineering & management during the design phase of a car.
- rocket_surgeron 4y ago
  The entire movie is a teenaged cringeworthy fever dream. Either immediately before or after that scene he goes on to tell his neighbor that the only reason oxygen masks are on airplanes is to keep people calm when they are about to die. >-Tyler Durden: Oxygen gets you high. In a catastrophic emergency, you're taking giant panicked breaths. Suddenly you become euphoric, docile. You accept your fate. It's all right here. Emergency water landing, 600 miles an hour. Blank faces, calm as Hindu cows.” Airline companies don't care if people are "calm" if they are going to die. They are not worried about the upset ghosts of dead passengers coming to haunt them. And oxygen doesn't turn you into a docile cow. I'm a volunteer EMT and if oxygen turned people docile that would make my job a hell of a lot easier. The oxygen is there to keep you alive at altitude if there is a decompression event. At sea level it does nothing. edit: the partial pressure of oxygen at sea level is ~160mmHg and airplane passenger masks supply ~122mmHg-- they only exist to keep you alive until the pilot can descend. One of the easiest ways to tell if I'm not going to get along with someone is if they unironically quote Fight Club.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    You appear to have understood the movie. > One of the easiest ways to tell if I'm not going to get along with someone is if they unironically quote Fight Club. Yep, lots of people... don't understand the movie. You'd think when it came to creating a strict cult and cutting people's balls off and shit, people'd start to go "wait a minute... wasn't this about escaping the media- and corporation-driven rat-race for freedom, and, uh, masculinity or something? WTF?" and start to get a clue that they maybe shouldn't trust everything this Tyler guy says because a lot of it might just be nice-sounding bullshit, let alone where it goes from there—but, shockingly, no. On the one hand, if so many people get it wrong, maybe that's the movie's fault; but on the other, it's not like the movie's subtle.
    - filoleg 4y ago
      Agreed. To add to it, the movie has some even more obvious things that make the actual message clear. The narrator keeps talking about how "everything is a copy of a copy of a copy", and Tyler keeps advocating for "breaking out of the system" to become individuals. Only for everyone to join project mayhem, shave their heads, dress in exact same clothing, get rid of their own names, and to obey every command of Tyler without questioning. None of it was subtle at all, it was as thick as it could possibly get. And there are plenty of examples in the movie that reaffirm those points too. I don't think of any way they could've made the entire message of the movie any more obvious, other than explicitly spelling it out.
- Rebelgecko 4y ago
  The movie quote is loosely based on a memo that Ford sent to the NHTSA to lobby against new safety standards. The so-called Pinto Memo has a lot of mythology around it. It wasn't specific to the Ford Pinto, but it was used in some of the Pinto lawsuits to say "this is the kind of cost-benefit analysis that Ford does when designing their fuel systems". The Pinto Memo also didn't compare the cost of safety improvements against potential lawsuits-it compared them against the NHTSA's own figure for the financial value of saving a life.
- stonemetal12 4y ago
  For the Takata airbag recalls most if not all major auto makers announced recalls before being forced to by the various transportation authorities. In the US for example recalls were announced by automakers in June, NHTSA didn't make it mandatory until November (according to wikipedia anyway). Though given this is a security thing, not a safety one is there an agency that could force the recall?

hef19898 4y ago

Totally ignoring all recalls car companies are legally required to do, aka those recalls in which the companies have no say in whatsoever. It makes for a good dialogue in a movie so.

Johnny555 4y ago

That makes fun movie dialog, but I don't think the car company decides on their own whether or not to do a safety recall. The NHTSA can force them to do a recall for a serious issue if the manufacturer doesn't do it voluntarily. The NHTSA usually finds out about defects by owners filing directly with the NHTSA, so it doesn't take direct cooperation from the manufacturer to start an investigation.

rtkwe 4y ago
In the early stages or sufficiently low levels of B they can. The NHTSA doesn't investigate every crash like the FAA does for plane crashes.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  The NTSB has a much larger role than the FAA in plane crash investigations.
  - rtkwe 4y ago
    True I knew in the moment I wasn't quite right about the exact agency. The core point stands though imo, car crashes don't receive the same scrutiny airplane crashes do in most cases.
mywittyname 4y ago
It still takes people being injured or dying over many years to find out about a flaw that was known to several levels of engineering & management during the design phase of a car.
rocket_surgeron 4y ago
The entire movie is a teenaged cringeworthy fever dream. Either immediately before or after that scene he goes on to tell his neighbor that the only reason oxygen masks are on airplanes is to keep people calm when they are about to die. >-Tyler Durden: Oxygen gets you high. In a catastrophic emergency, you're taking giant panicked breaths. Suddenly you become euphoric, docile. You accept your fate. It's all right here. Emergency water landing, 600 miles an hour. Blank faces, calm as Hindu cows.” Airline companies don't care if people are "calm" if they are going to die. They are not worried about the upset ghosts of dead passengers coming to haunt them. And oxygen doesn't turn you into a docile cow. I'm a volunteer EMT and if oxygen turned people docile that would make my job a hell of a lot easier. The oxygen is there to keep you alive at altitude if there is a decompression event. At sea level it does nothing. edit: the partial pressure of oxygen at sea level is ~160mmHg and airplane passenger masks supply ~122mmHg-- they only exist to keep you alive until the pilot can descend. One of the easiest ways to tell if I'm not going to get along with someone is if they unironically quote Fight Club.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  You appear to have understood the movie. > One of the easiest ways to tell if I'm not going to get along with someone is if they unironically quote Fight Club. Yep, lots of people... don't understand the movie. You'd think when it came to creating a strict cult and cutting people's balls off and shit, people'd start to go "wait a minute... wasn't this about escaping the media- and corporation-driven rat-race for freedom, and, uh, masculinity or something? WTF?" and start to get a clue that they maybe shouldn't trust everything this Tyler guy says because a lot of it might just be nice-sounding bullshit, let alone where it goes from there—but, shockingly, no. On the one hand, if so many people get it wrong, maybe that's the movie's fault; but on the other, it's not like the movie's subtle.
  - filoleg 4y ago
    Agreed. To add to it, the movie has some even more obvious things that make the actual message clear. The narrator keeps talking about how "everything is a copy of a copy of a copy", and Tyler keeps advocating for "breaking out of the system" to become individuals. Only for everyone to join project mayhem, shave their heads, dress in exact same clothing, get rid of their own names, and to obey every command of Tyler without questioning. None of it was subtle at all, it was as thick as it could possibly get. And there are plenty of examples in the movie that reaffirm those points too. I don't think of any way they could've made the entire message of the movie any more obvious, other than explicitly spelling it out.
Rebelgecko 4y ago
The movie quote is loosely based on a memo that Ford sent to the NHTSA to lobby against new safety standards. The so-called Pinto Memo has a lot of mythology around it. It wasn't specific to the Ford Pinto, but it was used in some of the Pinto lawsuits to say "this is the kind of cost-benefit analysis that Ford does when designing their fuel systems". The Pinto Memo also didn't compare the cost of safety improvements against potential lawsuits-it compared them against the NHTSA's own figure for the financial value of saving a life.
stonemetal12 4y ago
For the Takata airbag recalls most if not all major auto makers announced recalls before being forced to by the various transportation authorities. In the US for example recalls were announced by automakers in June, NHTSA didn't make it mandatory until November (according to wikipedia anyway). Though given this is a security thing, not a safety one is there an agency that could force the recall?