Way too extreme. Seeing the world in such manicheanist terms is not healthy.
All companies care about safety, to varying degrees and for a mix of reasons ranging from PR to regulatory burden to the fact the CEO uses the product.
Many don’t care enough by my subjective standards, but it’s silly and childish to say no company cares even the tiniest bit about safety in any context.
yes, all companies care about safety...after profits
we've structured corporations that this is the main driver, full stop.
as an example, earlier in my career i worked in aviation test equipment. for commercial and govt't agencies. let's just say i avoid flying anywhere at all costs now if i can. why? because, as always, safety is secondary to profits (and most of the time, you hope it is secondary and not ternary or worse). and this was in a 'highly regulated' industry.
Everything a company does must be "after profits" if you lose money on everything you do then you aren't running a company you are running (poorly I might add) a charity.
First it has to be profitable, then it has to be useful to the customer.
Meh — you’re getting into mind reading. Safety and profits are related. If you prefer to think every person who works at any company is a moustache-twirling villain, have at it. That hasn’t been my experience.
Except the relationship is not strong enough to compel companies to always do the right thing (or even to do so adequately often). Especially when they perceive that the market will let them get away with it. For example when negative impacts are scheduled to occur far into the future (or in the present but affecting non-customers, or the environment).
Or when they occur in the present, but (as with seatbelts before they were mandatory) the customers just don't perceive the risks.
If you prefer to think every person who works at any company is a moustache-twirling villain
The comment you initially chimed in on was definitely quite hyperbolic. But this take is also.
Of course not "every" person working at a company needs to be ethically challenged for bad things to happen. All that's need are a few bad apples (whom we know are in no short supply) at approrpriate levels of responsibility. The rest will simply go along, to keep their jobs.
> In 1949, Wisconsin-based Nash Motors became the first car company to offer them as an additional feature. Almost no one asked for them. In 1968, when seat belts became standard equipment, some drivers responded by cutting them out of their vehicles. In 1982, when Michigan State Rep. David Hollister introduced a state seat belt law, he received hate mail comparing him to Hitler. The reception to such laws in other states was similarly cool. In the 1980s, only 14% of all Americans used seat belts.
Volvo is a (mostly) made in China brand of a large Chinese automotive company. If in the past safety conscious swedish engineers cared about it, they surely have very little say right now.
Lucid has a sample size too small to evaluate.
What matters for safety is precisely one thing. Does the company culture, meaning the engineers on the ground, view it as a goal by itself or a list of checkboxes you need to tick.
> If in the past safety conscious swedish engineers cared about it, they surely have very little say right now
Subsidiaries can have a different culture from their parent organizations. Volvo still has engineers and designers in Sweden, and Tata owns Land Rover and Jaguar, which seem to be doing okay safety wise and don't appear to be obviously cutting corners like the Vinfast project. I have seen no evidence of a decline in Volvo's safety record, the "but surely Geely doesn't care." argument is a reverse appeal-to-authority, in the absence of evidence. It is entirely possible that Geely (and Tata) may have poor safety cultures, but their foreign subsidiaries do a much better job.
Companies like Stellantis are very keen on brands using standardized platforms. I would be very surprised if in the future Volvos weren't using engineered in China Platforms, which are localized for Europe (same for Land Rover with engineered in India).
If Swedish engineers are just developing hats, their influence on crash safety is significantly reduced. Right now Volvo still uses an inhouse platform, where they do actually have control, but it is obviously inefficient to develop numerous similar platforms for different brands.
Sure, but we should be clear that it's speculation on future behavior (sound as it may be). That has not happened (yet). Some MNC's succeed in not killing the goose that lays the golden eggs (I'm also speculating)
Volvo is an interesting case. Being acquired, becoming a subsidiary, is famous last words for the past culture and focus. If the acquirer really cared to retain that safety focus, I would have expected doubling down on related advertising and PR work.
But from where I sit, Volvo advertising and safety PR has entirely disappeared. That does not bode well for that "safety focus". Anyone has current info?
As pointed out elsewhere their cars still perform well on crash tests and they still use their own platform.
I think what will or won't break the whole thing os whether their next generation of cars will still use a self developed platform. If they do, then I would consider it quite likely that management at Volvo has the independence needed to keep their own vision. If Geely forces a platform onto them, then I think it is a pretty clear statement that they see Volvo as nothing but brand recognition.
I agree, except that Lucid’s small sample size has achieved the only complete 5-star rating on every test on their one vehicle; this can’t happen unless, as you say, the engineers on the ground view it as a goal by itself.
The only other company that has done this, to my knowledge, is Volvo.
>this can’t happen unless, as you say, the engineers on the ground view it as a goal by itself.
Obviously it can. Cars are engineered to satisfy specific test, which are well known in advance. You can always engineer cars to satisfy them.
Crash tests aren't everything though and I mention sample size because issues might only reveal themselves after a prolonged period in a few cars. E.g. a defect on a very important component, which only occurs after some years in a few circumstances is an obvious safety issue which Lucids could not have proven themselves against.
I say this not as particular slight against Lucid, but because safety is more than satisfying tests. Often safety is where you are doing things which aren't tested at all.
>The only other company that has done this, to my knowledge, is Volvo.
Looking at the Euro NCAP is the VW ID.7 Tourer is also getting pretty decent marks.
I meant Volvo’s position under the new ownership. It’s possible Geely enforces Volvo to care as much as they care. It’s also possible they let Volvo be Volvo around safety and have some other way to juice the returns and make them a bunch of money from the purchase. Time will tell.
I think Volvo is a good example for why most companies don't care about safety any more than the law and basic PR requires: the market does not reward companies that try to use safety as a selling point. Volvo is the only major car company that consistently manufactures cars that widely exceed legal safety requirements, but have a global market share of less than half a percent.
That's probably about the number of people who take safety into consideration as a major factor when making purchasing decisions.
Counterpoint: safety can be a market differentiator. Volvo had seatbelts as standards before regulators mandated them. To this day, and leans heavily into safety. I can confidently say Volvo cares more about safety than Vinfast.
You are wrong about cars. There are many automakers who absolutely care about safety, particularly in Germany, where even the slightest possibility of safety concerns can end an initiative.
Launch fast, ignore obvious things. I see it daily: „just ship products, we finish them when they come for repairs“. Scary new world, nobody is really responsible for this. The workers do not stay long. As well as managers.
I recall a discussion here about the decline in software quality, from many years ago. Someone argued that if we designed hardware the way we design software, we'd be too afraid to go outside. At the time, I thought it was just hyperbole...
It's still clearly an exaggeration, but one could argue that reality is gradually moving in that direction.
My take on this that's more to do with increase in software complexity and "quarterly thinking" than "people just don't care." As an embedded engineer I don't get much to say except maybe sprint to sprint unless I start my own company.
My director pushes production guys really hard. They sometimes close an eye and ship a bit faulty product. No screws on heatspreader or wrong thermal pad. And here you go, these things do not last long. But in the books revenue was made in that year. Repairs will come later as separate expense.
> I recall a discussion here about the decline in software quality, from many years ago. Someone argued that if we designed hardware the way we design software, we'd be too afraid to go outside. At the time, I thought it was just hyperbole...
Lead paint on children's toys and asbestos in the walls suggest there has never been a culture of making sure it is safe before putting it in production even in the physical world.
But asbestos in the walls is great for the safety of those living there — the place doesn't burn down so easily. It's the safety of anyone who inhales the dust when the place gets broken down that's endangered by asbestos.
> AI-powered Talent Matching: Leverage AI to identify and match top talent across blue collar and white collar roles from a broad range of sources including contingent workers, freelancers, and project-based workers.
GDPR may have technically replaced the right to be forgotten with a more limited right of erasure, but unless you care about legal phrasing it's an easy thing to mix up.
Also, it does look like a GDPR issue to me — not that I'm a lawyer, so usual caveat applies, all I can do is look at the plain language of GDPR on the Commission website.
GDPR regulates "personal data" (information that relates to an identified or identifiable individual), and looking at the "lawful purposes" list in Article 6, people running such a thing would seem to me to need to make some kind of argument about "legitimate interests" or "performance of a contract".
It may be that a plain reading of this isn't giving me the correct answer, but I don't see how placing specifically whistleblowers (rather than, say, known embezzlers) on a blacklist would meet the standards: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...
Self-identifying yourself on Reddit and then posting classified company information in a childish tone would definitely get you blacklisted. If you read the post, it's clear that he didn't care about fixing the problems, he just wanted to dunk on the company for Reddit updoots.
The Oxford dictionary defines "mass media" thusly The main means of mass communication, such as broadcasting, publishing, and the internet, considered collectively.
The reason Vinfast investigated his account was because he was publicizing its flaws, leading to his firing. Bad PR is the mechanism that going to a newspaper or TV station would have led to reform, he got the same result by going to Reddit: you can't argue with the results.
That's your read. I read him as someone who did want to fix problems and was actively prevented from doing so for a long time, and has left that part of his career extremely frustrated as a result.
Yeah, maybe he could've been more professional. I guess. In my mind though the far more important takeaway is how a major automaker is (yet again) cutting corners and turning out ever shittier products at ever higher prices and pocketing the margins. And as someone who is actually looking into a vehicle in similar categories, if I could get an engineer like him from every manufacturer to give me the non-corporate-speak truth of what goes on in their design process, that would be 1000x more valuable than all the samey-bullshit-marketing-fluff that all of them turn out.
And you know, if the company itself was more interested in making a quality product than just telling people their product is quality they probably wouldn't give half a shit if an engineer was out discussing the process. I get that NDAs are most often (and for!) protecting a company's IP, and that makes good and is sense. However the same agreements also allow said company to do all kinds of horseshit with at least a decent expectation that their engineers won't spill the beans to the wider public, and that sucks ass.
I do find it wild he used his main account instead of a throwaway ranting about vinfast and communists (and still actively responding with account about how he won't suicide in thread about article). Seem's like clout chasing behavior but maybe he just doesn't give a shit.
The weird thing for me here is why it is relevant that it's an electric car, at the end of the day the failure was with the engineering of the suspension, nothing to do with the way that it is powered. This could have happened with any vehicle, this article seems to be click baiting on the fact that the model was an EV.
Electric vehicles are very heavy, which means a lot of mechanical stress for the suspension. And any rate, if a particular EV model was what's affected, why not specify that?
I'd still say that it's motor vehicles in general that are getting bigger and heavier. The unfair comparison (Mazda CX-9 SUV) has an ICE vehicle weighing in heavier, but even my small-by-modern-standards Mazda 3 Sport is <200kg from the base Tesla Model 3. Lighter, but not dramatically so. Same with the Ford Mustang fastback (~3600lbs), and the ragtop is even chunkier (at ~3700lbs).
EVs might have started heavier, but it's modern vehicles that are heavy more than EVs. Sure, you can point to the OEMs that brute-forced their way into the market (the Hummer springs to mind), but the truly preposterous are, fortunately, small in number.
>> This comparison is stupid. It is just 3 versions of one car and one version of another car.
Huh? Why is it a stupid comparison? It is comparing the Model 3 (very popular EV) against a similarly-positioned ICE vehicle. I showed three trims of the Model 3 in order to avoid people saying, "yeah, but you didn't post the weights of all the different versions..."
GP said simply "Electric vehicles are very heavy" - that means all EVs. Not some EVs. So showing a comparable pair of EV & ICE vehicles to disprove it is a completely reasonable comparison.
I'm not trying to "demonstrate a general trend." I'm providing evidence to disprove a blanket statement. And from a logic point of view, showing a single counterexample disproves it.
Separately, the Model 3 Performance is most comparable to the M3. And they are virtually the same weight (as the data that I presented showed). So, not a disingenuous comparison. But thanks for the accusation :)
Looks like 2300 lbs but if you're comparing base trims that's 1200 lbs lighter than the base Mustang. A bit of a stretch for "about". And also a nonsensical comparison. Different purposes, different class of vehicle, different regulatory / safety requirements.
Even if it is a skateboard, it is still heavier than a non-electric skateboard. As GP said, electric vehicles are very heavy. My electric bike weighs considerably more than non-electric bikes, our electric scooters weigh more than kick scooters, and parent is being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian.
A Mitsubishi I-MiEV at 2268 LB (3329 LB GVWR - 661 LB vehicle capacity weight) isn't a ton lighter than a Ford Mustang, but it's on the lighter side for an EV.
Same reason phone headlines always mention branding when they're iPhones: more people click on headlines like that. In this case one could argue that it's relevant because no ICE models had this flaw, but I'm not convinced this wasn't done to make money off the EV/anti-EV flame wars that are happening online every day.
The headline is clickbaity for sure. Vinfast hired JLR to design some aspects of their cars and the guy was one of the engineers assigned to it.
On Reddit, he praises JLR engineering standards and says the problem was Vinfast’s leadership ignoring engineering concerns, always picking the cheapest materials, and skipping safety tests.
The title makes it seem like JLR’s cars are the ones being whistleblown, which isn’t true.
It’s the opposite. Vinfast hired JLR to design their cars. This guy works for JLR and blew the whistle on Vinfast’s leadership not caring about the safety of VF6 and VF7.
Nice self-own by Tata. Guy blows whistle while working at their obscure VinFast brand, but they sack him once he's moved to work for Jaguar - so all the headlines are about JLR rather than VinFast...
Trying to make cheap non-electrical vehicles makes sense, because it's mainstream and has been for a long time. A cheap brand would make a car like the ones we had 5 years ago, which are safe. A kind of random number, but you get the idea.
I've always viewed EVs as a luxury.
While it's interesting to experiment with cheap EV designs, the short or midterm goal shouldn't be production.
There's a reason Tesla sells its cars even though they are expensive. They're supposed to be expensive since they are basically high-scale experiment.
First rule of blowing the whistle: never disclose your identity if you can avoid it, even to authorities. There’s no upside to that and authorities are incompetent at preserving anonymity if it’s even legal for them to do so. (Exception: you’re filing a whistleblower report to the SEC, there’s sweet anonymous $$$ for you then.)
This happened in the other SEC when a football player at an SEC school provided evidence that there were illegal benefits being provided to some of his teammates. The PDF report blacked out his name but was done in such a way that copying and pasting the redacted portion of the report showed his name in clear text.
PDFs have so many ways to smuggle data. The only way I would feel safe sharing a PDF was to reprocess it in a dedicated pipeline that took a fuzzy monochrome screenshot of each page and package it up as a cbz (zip file of sequential images).
For some reason this has been downvoted, it seems some people on here think that whistleblowing is never about ego. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a factor most of the time.
Reading the reddit thread it reeks of fresh out of school MEs making the wrong assumptions and implicit value judgments when weighing tradeoffs because it's what they're familiar with and school does a really great job indoctrinating them to pursue performance on first order metrics (e.g. weight) the detriment of secondary or "not even mentioned but implied" metrics (failure mode, serviceability, tooling costs, etc) and a lack of senior people like the whistleblower to call them on it.
While I sympathize with the complaints about budget and time that kind of further reinforces my point. In the face of those constraints experienced engineers would have designed something conservative with room for improvement. It's new engineers who more frequently tend to over-optimize design something right up to within an inch of its life when faced with tight constraints.
A lot of stuff that is perfectly possible to do "safely" is only possible if your head is full of a decade of experience and familiarity with the real world successful solutions to similar problems. People with that knowledge and in an environment were other corners are being cut tend to produce designs that have room for minor revision by other parties as well as corner cutting (i.e. the testing guys pencil whip it) while still actually working well in reality, though perhaps leaving some performance in key areas on the table.
If you are fresh out of school and your head is full of ancient knowledge that is in the textbooks and lessons and tidbits of "the new hotness" and you are too reliant on simulation, testing, and other process that is done for process sake in school you are likely to design something that leaves less potential performance in measured areas (weight, cost, etc) but has lot of teething issues on secondary or unmeasured criteria (i.e. the tool and die guys will hate you, your item will wear rapidly in a case that while not average, represents a large number of users, etc)
Look at Juicero. It hit the key points, it juiced things, but it was wildly expensive and a bear to manufacture and operating costs were comical because there were no adults in the room to tell the noobs that their weighting of the tradeoffs both expressed and implied wasn't quit right. Here the same sort of inexperienced people were told to produce a suspension befitting a sexy new EV but also to make it cheap. Well they did that, but they also made something that's coming apart at the seams from day 1 and doesn't age gracefully at all and in cases of extreme use results in spectacular failures.
You see this sort of pattern in all sorts of technical fields.
Jaguar and Land [Range] Rover are notorious for their electrical problems. I wouldn't trust an ICE vehicle from them let alone an EV. I doubt that even with new ownership or investment (or whatever is going on here) they can overcome the culture of unreliability and poor quality that has been built over a century.
As a car guy I heard about the whole VinFast saga a few months ago. It was kinda shocking because just about every car Youtuber that got a chance to review the VinFast shat all over it. Apparently after a while they pulled all review cars and eventually let more reviewers access them after they sorted them out. But IIRC even after that, reviewers of the "sorted" cards noted that their were still issues and they all seemed to be getting the same set of "sorted" cards which indicates the ones on the lot were probably still dogshit.
Jaguar was historically known for terrible quality control, right? When I was young, the joke was that you had to own two; one to use while the other was in the shop...
Yeah "once great" is definitely a huge exaggeration. They're terribly unreliable. In the 90s we had one Jag in the neighborhood I lived in and it never moved lol. Everyone knew they were junk even back then.
How it usually went (not sure about now, but certainly 10 years ago): Dodge < Jaguar/Landrover < Germans cars < American cars < Japanese cars
Is there any society on the planet that isn't fundamentally corrupt at this point? We put whistleblower protection on the books and they punish those who step forward. It's just disgraceful.
Key takeaways here are probably "Vinfast doesn't have much in house engineering" and "don't buy one right now".