[SHAKEDECADE]

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.

[Johnny555]

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.

[rocket_surgeron]

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.

[Rebelgecko]

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.

[mywittyname]

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.

[stonemetal12]

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?

[rtkwe]

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.

[hef19898]

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.