[magduf]

>To your point, the GM issue was involved in 30 accidents in a couple years but no fatalities. The problem is obviously not a failure in a parking lot, but at speed.

I'm not familiar with the specifics of that case, but having a low system voltage is more likely at parking lot speeds because the alternator isn't turning very fast, whereas at speed the alternator should be generating enough power to run everything including EPS, but maybe they underspecced the alternator, so I can see it happening. Still, losing your power assist at speed is still dangerous of course, but it is recoverable, and it's nothing like having a critical system fail in an aircraft. Failures in cars are always safer than in aircraft, because you're already on the ground. This is why safe design is so important in aircraft: if something goes wrong in a car, it might result in a wreck of a few vehicles at worst (multiplied by the number of cars experiencing that failure), but many times tragedy is avoided because the driver just needs to steer away from traffic and avoid running into something too fast. In an aircraft, there's no such thing as a "fender bender"; crashes are usually fatal, and they usually carry dozens to hundreds of passengers.

>Recalls cost a lot of money. In the GM case it affected 1MM cars. I didn’t look up the cost of each fix, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it cost nine figures.

That seems high: you're assuming each car cost $1000 to fix there. That's a lot of money to fix one component; at that volume, the part probably cost well under $100 each, and as another poster noted, the dealer labor required was pretty small.

[bumby]

I completely agree that car failures are almost always less severe than aircraft. However, to play devil's advocate, pilots have much more stringent training requirements and that's a relevant point to the MAX situation. I hope I didn't come across that I was trying to equate the two in terms of criticality, just trying to point out a couple counter examples to statements about car software not being critical. The details of the Honda case seem even more critical than the GM one.

I was estimating at $100 per fix (since it's just the labor cost of software). At roughly $120 per labor hour multiplied by 1MM vehicles is where I came up with the nine figure mark. At $1k per fix, it would be in the 10 digits. Regardless, it was overshot and I corrected it with the details in a reply (since I couldn't edit the original). It only comes in at 0.5 hours per fix. Not chump change but the decision to fix it may also have been influenced by the Toyota accelerator and GM ignition recalls that got a lot of press.