[slg]

>It’s both, right? The competitors may very well be just as safe in those conditions, but we wouldn’t know based on their liability stance; the Fight Club equation simply doesn’t apply.

I was referencing Fight Club as an example of an auto manufacturer making a life and death decision based off their financial incentives and not the best interest of the customer. The decision to take on liability is about money, not confidence in safety.

>With Mercedes, the Fight Club equation gives something like a mathematical guarantee of their estimated confidence of the safety of the system. There are no mathematical guarantees from the competitors.

You also have to factor in the marketing aspects. I'll reference another movie here in Tommy Boy[1]. Mercedes knows a move like this is attractive to consumers. People will look at it and think it means the system is safer. This decision will sell cars. But a guarantee doesn't tell you anything about the quality of the product. As Chris Farley's character says, you can "take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed".

Maybe the system is truly dangerous and taking on this liability would be a losing proposition alone, yet adding in these additional sales from the marketing of this liability coverage yields a net positive for the decision. Or maybe the system truly is incredibly safe. There is no way for us to know. I am simply pointing out that this decision about liability is largely meaningless when judging safety because safety is only one of numerous criteria used to make the decision.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEB7WbTTlu4&t=49s

[refulgentis]

> I was referencing Fight Club as an example of an auto manufacturer making a life and death decision based off their financial incentives and not the best interest of the customer. The decision to take on liability is about money, not confidence in safety.

The Fight Club scene is about how these two things are integrated: their confidence in safety defines their ability to choose to take on liability.

Yes, its intent in the story is to horrify: there's a lack of humanity, a reliance on a simple function relating those two variables.

However, that doesn't imply the two variables are unrelated, in fact, it implies they are completely correlated.

[slg]

This real life example is more complicated than the Fight Club version. It includes more variables like the added sales I mentioned and all these variables are unknown. How can you draw conclusions about one variable in a formula in which you don't know the value of any of the variables?

[refulgentis]

Not sure what you mean: the movie scene has the same property. It's not about the risk of individual failures of components, it's risk of a payout

Strong indicator I believe my anti-flood machine is good at preventing floods is I'm willing to take on paying for any liabilities you incur from flooding

[slg]

You are only thinking about payouts and not the change in sales. Imagine you make $100m selling your anti-flood machines. Maybe your machine fails 10% of the time and a failure costs 2x the unit price. Taking on liability in that situation would bring you down to $80m. Bad deal for you. But what if someone in marketing comes and tells you that market research suggests taking on liability leads to an extra $30m in sales. You come out ahead because the $30m in new revenue exceeds the $26m in new liability. That isn’t confidence in your machine. It is marketing and accounting.

[refulgentis]

Occam's Razor: would only work in the short run, crash data goes to regulators.

[bombcar]

Many things can be marketing - the drain cleaner sold in a bottle in a plastic bag doesn’t need it for safety - it needs it because it makes the product look more “dangerous”.

The interesting part is the balance they have to strike - be too lax and everyone uses it and you get the Tesla “autopilot did a big bad” articles; make it too restricted and you get “the damn thing never lets you turn it on”.