re: #191 Anymouse 🌹

I’ll agree to they should be more reliable than the average person. A standard of better is much preferable to a standard of perfect (which might never be obtainable).

Now if we can have a disinterested government doing the testing, rather than the corporations which stand to profit (“more doctors recommend Camels than any other cigarette”), I would be much less sceptical about the issue.

(The issues of Uber muscling its way into cities and states and ignoring regulations, rapey drivers, and sexually-harassing managers are not anecdotes. They represent the company’s culture. Why should I trust that company at all?)

I’m not usually a free market champion but this emphasis on government testing isn’t conducive to rapid progress. Space X lands reusable rockets on their asses, NASA wasn’t about to do that on their own. Historically government testing of automobiles has never once led to new safety features, they’ve always been implemented first by the industry in production vehicles only to be mandated long afterwards. Seatbelts had been standard for ten years in US production vehicles before the government mandated all cars have them. It took another fifteen years for the government to mandate that people actually use them. It took 20 years between when the first airbags were installed in passenger vehicles and when the government mandated all cares have them. A lot of people hated both, thought they were unsafe, irrationally feared that seatbelts and airbags would trap them in a burning vehicle.

Yes, corporations have a profit motive but that works both ways, they want to get their products to market but they also need to limit their liability. Unlike gun manufacturers car makers aren’t insulated from wrongful death lawsuits, that alone gives them enough motivation to make their products truly as safe as possible.