Outside of a brief aside in the movie Fight Club and what I assume are economic reasons, I’ve never seen good compelling reasons why airplanes are grounded for accidents, while cars do not seem to undergo the same level of scrutiny?
Is it just because cars are tested more before they enter the market?
From an outsider’s perspective, it seems that airplanes are already much safer than cars- so what gives?
In: Engineering
What absolutely cracks me up is that car dealerships (in the US or maybe just in my state) are not required to address issues that are part of a recall when a car is sold or when a car is brought in for service.
Seriously. A while ago I bought a “nice” used car and within a week I got a warning light for the tail light. I was driving by the actual dealership, so I just brought it in: “oh yeah… there’s a recall for that… we can take care of it for you now…”
Really assholes? How about you fix the shit that needs fixing before you sell me the fucking thing in the first place?
Cars don’t fall on your house.
Well, not very often anyways.
There are in fact DO NOT DRIVE recalls. The Toyota Matrix and others got one yesterday for an airbag fault. But most recalls are annoyances more than anything.
It’s real simple: people need to trust that that thing above their heads isn’t going to crash on top of them.
It’s why we’ll never have flying cars. No one wants to get hurt by something preventable falling out of the sky.
because there is no version of the FAA or DOT that can step in and enforce it. Air traffic occurs within the confines of heavily regulated areas (airports) so knowing if you’re violating an order to ground your fleet is easy. And…….the fines are massive.
Automobile recalls usually only extend to a production run, not an entire model. Cops don’t know if your F150 was manufactured between May and July of 2019 to have the authority to even pull you over if they tried it.
The industries are very different – the auto industry depends on selling vehicles to private individuals and lobbies extensively to keep safety problems “in house”. Safety problems are typically delayed, blamestormed against the driver or external conditions, and obfuscated unless the furor is so bad (stock price drops, legal costs mount) that they have to act on a timely basis.
Airplane manufacturers’ entire industry depends on the perception of very safe systems from pilot training to lavatory operation. Anything that happens instantly turns up in the global news and both the customers (airlines) and manufacturers see a huge hit. Watching Boeing dance around the “plug” incident is enlighting. I’m waiting for the poor guy on third shift that was told to skip the fasteners to be pilloried, much as the assembly techs were told to just jerk wiring harnesses through fuel tanks to speed up production in the late 90s.
Not too sound callous, but if you car breaks due to a safety issue, you MIGHT injure yourself or maybe a couple of other people; and that’s MIGHT, most likely nothing of consequence will happen. If an airplane suffers a safety issue, you could lose an entire airplane full of people, plus possibly many more on the ground.
They sometimes do get “grounded” in that the manufacturer orders an immediate recall with a recommendation to not drive the vehicle until said safety feature is fixed.
Re: tabata airbags and the Firestone tire recall.
There are very few ways in which a car can fail mechanically outside of operator error and poor maintenance that can result in a fatal accident. Most mechanical failures will simply result in the vehicle becoming safely immobile. Additionally, a catastrophic failure has very limited potential to cause fatalities. The same is not true of aircraft.
It’s also worth noting that aircraft fleets are only grounded if a mechanical failure is the suspected cause of a crash. And car companies are similarly required to issue product recalls and advisories to vehicle owners in the event that a serious mechanical flaw is discovered on those vehicles. However there is also no practical way to effectively “ground” a fleet of cars.
Cars can be “grounded”. It’s called a Stop Drive Recall. Manufacturers can issue a recall with a directive to not drive until the vehicle is inspected. They can’t force you to stop driving, but your insurance may not cover you if you continue to drive after being notified of a Stop Drive Recall.
Very simple approach.
If a single car crashes due to a safety issue, out of tens of thousands produced, the worst that can happen is a handful of lives lost. If it’s a batch issue of a hundred impacted cars, it’ll be realized when the fatality count is still in the sub-20 range.
A single plane is hundreds of people. That don’t have the ability to say “this doesn’t seem safe so I’m not flying,” since the airline can swap their plane up through the moment of boarding. And when it’s very clearly a mechanical failure, you just ground the fleet long enough to say “was it maintenance or manufacturing,” and then if it’s manufacturing, is it a production lot or the fleet.
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