[ariwilson]

The point of TFA that the car failure / bad service happened to CarAndDriver's long term test drive Model 3 early on its lifespan and they have never had this happen before for any of their long term cars.

"This sort of shit happens to all cars" misses the significance of this event due not applying basic statistics. Simply put, readers of this article have far more cars than the writers.

[alphabettsy]

I’m fairly certain this single data point is statistically meaningless.

To me the story is about reliability, the changing nature of automotive problems and how they handle customer service.

[cjbprime]

No, the misapplication of basic statistics is yours in concluding that one data point in a small sample size must be significant. The opposite is true.

[ariwilson]

Significance in a magazine article != statistical significance, which is unfortunately very hard to come by in the real world. Simply put, I'm willing to give more credence to a car magazine talking about never having encountered a problem like this before in a pool of vehicles than random commenters on HN.