Ya know, maybe and possibly?

That actually sounds like a perfectly sensible rule. I shouldn’t have to use reading glasses to see the dashboard.

Clarkson goes on about this, how in the US they write stuff on the panel, but everywhere else uses symbols. To be honest I think Champolion would have struggled decoding some modern cars.

Nah, intelligent regulation is possible in principle.

I can imagine that many actual existing EU regs on cars are silly but I can see scope for regulation of externalities – e.g. your headlights blind me too easily, your turning indicators are not clear enough. Also: why on earth didn’t the EU legislate to make it impossible to misfuel your car with petrol/diesel?

I’d be mildly interested to know which EU car regs are bonkers/dangerous/corrupt.

And another thing: all those pompous Young People who moan on and on about the death-dealing propensity of SUVs because they are so heavy; do they know how heavy battery cars are?

If it looked like a pointless rule that was put there as a clever way to block overseas manufacturers from competing, while claiming to be about protecting consumers from “unsafe” or “low quality” products, I’d be a bit more worked up about it. But this is something trivial and cheap to comply with, where meeting one country’s standards seems unlikely to make you fail another’s, doesn’t strangle innovation as far as I can see (electronic dashboards aren’t ruled out provided the font is the right size, which seems fair), and the safety angle is real enough – a quick glance should be enough, I don’t want to be squinting at the dash, nor do I fancy getting hit by another driver who is.

As much as libertarians and classical liberals are aggrieved by the sheer volume of law and regulation these days, regulation of car safety really only restricts our freedom in so far as it reduces consumer choice. And most people would prefer car safety rules to be kept tight rather than liberalised. (It also restricts our freedom to found a car-making business, I suppose, but most of us have no interest in doing so, and would anyone who did even expect to be able to do that in an unregulated way?) You can’t control your level of safety when using the road by ensuring you drive a decent car, while letting people with less concern for that kind of thing buy whatever crappy cheapo rubbish they want. The more people have autonomous emergency braking, for example, the less likely I am to get knocked down at a pedestrian crossing or have an idiot run into the back of me when I’m queuing at a junction. I don’t want to get blinded by headlights, I don’t want to smash into the back of someone because their rear lights aren’t good enough for a foggy day. And this is part of the point of living in a relatively rich society – we can start caring more about safety and environmental concerns, because we can afford to. Cars are big lump of fast-moving metal that can do an awful lot of damage. In a society where few people could afford a car with decent safety features, then it’d be a tougher choice just how tightly we regulated them and we might have to accept more deaths on the road as a result.

Incidentally, just in terms of the way regs get specified, I’d much rather they did list a minimum size, than just saying “symbols for the following items on the dashboard need to be large enough to be legible” without indicating how big that is. That would leave uncertainty in terms of how big is big enough, might lead car makers to overdo sizes out of unnecessary caution, give an excuse to ban foreign car imports because they were deemed to not comply… just put a figure down and stick to it. It doesn’t need to be perfect. But you could get decent scientific evidence on how visible, distinguishable etc such symbols are at different sizes so it wouldn’t be totally arbitrary. This is probably the kind of thing that should really being regulated at the level of the EU/US/Japan/Korea/UK etc coming together and making an agreement on tbh. Not a lot of point having separate standards between trading blocs for something like this.

The company will be able to fix the issue via an over-the-air update.

Not even hidden in the story, it’s right up there in the article header.

Hardly a “mass-scale recall”.

The rule “Basic warnings should be visible to the driver” seems not only sensible, but kinda vital.

Sure, it gets translated into baby-talk in the process, but knowing how companies do their utmost to get around regulations, explicitly saying “The font size must be at least X” is inevitable.

Can’t get worked up about this one..

@Chris Miller

I never understood American road markings.

Whats a X-ing School?
Do they teach people to cross the road there?

I drove a Tesla. Enjoyed the experience, but I did ask if I could enlarge the speed readout. It is a bit on the small side.

It sounds similar to when I’m artworking leaflets.
Candidate says: “I want to say more there”
Me: it won’t fit.
Candidate: “Well, just make the font smaller”.
Me: Then it will be too small.

I have a fixed template of fonts and sizes for writing leaflets BECAUSE IT WORKS. And you don’t get an effective leaflet – or *any* printed work – by cramming more and more and more text in, crushing it down to fit in. C’mon, we’re trying to present a profession image and *increase* the likelyhood it will be looked at ‘twixt letterbox and bin, not reduce it.

What does the fact that Tesla failed to follow published mandatory safety guidelines have to do with whether we have too much government?

The issue at hand is Tesla’s competence, or lack thereof, not whether there’s too much government.

the symbols all seemed fine to start with – what has changed is they are changing some symbols to now spell out the warning more prominently. Seems entirely pointless to me as it was fine (and pretty obvious) before.

See here for what has changed:

https://www.notateslaapp.com/img/containers/article_images/tesla-screen/indicator-lights.jpg/59853825762e4b9b7e6fbe30abd64691.jpg

It also restricts our freedom to found a car-making business, I suppose, but most of us have no interest in doing so

Well, that’s fine then, huh?

@HHG

Not saying it’s fine. I stuck that in as a concession to the libertarian/classical liberal position – this sort of stuff makes us poorer without realising it, because even if it’s not me who’s been stopped from starting an innovative car-maker, someone out there almost certainly has been. But 99% of us are only thinking about the issue as consumers, and truth be told most of us would prefer car manufacturers were held to a high standard on safety (and probably would prefer that even given that it’s making us poorer in invisible ways).

If you want to bang the “there’s too much government these days!” drum, and expect normies to dance to it, then “they’re even insisting car dashboards are safe!!” is not the kind of tune that’s going to work them up into a frenzy. It’s a very fine drum to bang, but there are plenty of better tunes to play on it.

But 99% of us are only thinking about the issue as consumers, and truth be told most of us would prefer car manufacturers were held to a high standard on safety (and probably would prefer that even given that it’s making us poorer in invisible ways).

Well, that’s fine then, huh?

@bind

I did look into this a bit (out of purely academic interest, I don’t claim any expertise) and I was surprised how much the profile of serious or fatal traffic accidents differs between the US and Europe. Comes from the different types of roads and typical journey patterns, as well as differences in what they’re driving. Road design matters too, things like Europeans having more roundabouts so you get more collisions than at junctions but at lower speed and a different angle – which in turn changes the effectiveness of safety features like AEB. IIRC a huge difference between US and EU fatalities is that far more Americans die in roll-overs.

I don’t know how well the US and EU crash regulations reflect their respective risk profiles, but I can understand their regulators having different priorities. On the other hand, like I said above, if they knocked their heads together with the Japanese, Koreans, British, maybe even the Chinese if they want to up their domestic standards, then you could imagine global alignment on safety being beneficial to both industry and consumers. A very well-funded globe-spanning crash-testing organisation should be able to put cars through their paces more thoroughly than the same money being spent on a bunch of regional/national bodies that more-or-less replicate what each other are doing. Car design and manufacture is getting more global, as the cost of separate models for national markets has become prohibitive, so global standards would be a logical next step.

(There are quite a few global standards in car making in fact, for components etc, but not so much for the big picture stuff like safety.)

@HHG

Where did I say it was “fine”? Like most things in life, car safety regs have got costs, they’ve got benefits, and the way you net the two out against each other is both subjective (there’s no single right answer, how you value things depends on personal preferences) and situational (in a richer society people tend to value safety more highly). Like I said, a lot of the costs are the kind of opportunity costs that it’s very easy to underestimate – possibilities of innovation that go forgone and unimagined. If you feel that car safety is just another arena of overregulation, part of the mollycoddling of our society leading to the ossification of our economy, then I’m not gonna say you’re wrong. Strikes me as a perfectly valid opinion. My point is that it’s a minority one, and “OMG THEY’RE MAKING OUR CARS TOO SAFE, THE BASTARDS!!!” doesn’t strike me as the libertarian rallying cry that’s finally gonna get the masses on-side.

Not denying that there’s a bond between man and machine, or that the motorist’s psyche contains a political vein of the “just leave us alone” hue (Jeremy Clarkson’s automotive politics certainly tapped into something), but if you ask people whether they want to share the roads with more dangerous cars, then I’m confident most would say no. Even if it costs them cars which are a bit whizzier or cheaper or more exciting. Years ago I did wonder whether Elon Musk’s aggressive approach to rolling out autonomous driving might trigger popular resentment of regulators’ “safetyism” culture as they pushed back on him – if millions of people get to try an amazing new feature then Tesla get told they must uninstall or disable it, would consumers blame Musk for not putting safety first and following proper procedures, or get angry at the regulator for attacking innovation?

But that whole “we’re really 100% going to deliver full self-driving, the future is here baby!” shtick turned out to hucksterism, other companies’ attempts at genuine self-driving have struggled too, and the safety record of Tesla’s tech hasn’t made a convincing case that they’re being stifled by overregulation against the transformationally safer robot drivers we were promised. Maybe the anti-safetyism revolt will happen yet, but I’m not convinced it’ll be car safety regs that drive it. A more likely, and more Clarksonian, trigger might be regulations on the activity of driving rather than on the vehicle – very low speed limits, pedestrianisation, and so on. (Even there, I’ve been surprised how well speed limit restrictions can fare in opinion polls. Safetyism isn’t just something that’s been imposed from the top against the fervent wishes of the population. Is the underlying explanation for that something economic, just an extension of the fact richer people value safety? Or more socio-cultural, like the fact we have fewer kids now so even the possibility of a child dying is treated as a mindboggling disaster rather than, statistically, something that’s bound to happen from time to time? Even theological, that the risk of death triggers a deeper existential dread in a largely post-religious society? I dunno. But the safetyist phenomenon is real enough. As are its costs.)

USians (for obvious reasons) drive more than twice as many miles each year than their UK equivalents. Here, a 100 mile journey is a bit of a trek; in some parts of the US, it’s popping out for some shopping.