July 1, 2024 • 42 mins
Sometimes, a tech company pushes out a product that has a flaw bad enough to prompt that company to issue a recall. From television antennas to the Tesla Cybertruck, we look at some notable (perhaps Galaxy Note-able) recalls in tech history.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you? So recently I came across a headline
in the Register that read, and that's three recalls for
(00:26):
Tesla cybertruck in as many months. And from that headline
I infer the intent behind the wording is to say
the Tesla Cybertruck, even with all its numerous delays, was
still rushed off to consumers without going through a thorough
quality control process. Worse that, these issues are ones that
are bad enough to necessitate a recall, in which a
(00:48):
company requests that customers return purchase products due to some
flaw in the product itself, a flaw that could potentially
lead to harm. Are the very least legal liability for
the company. And we'll talk about the specific recalls for
the cyber truck toward the end of this episode, but
in the meantime, I thought it might be interesting to
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talk about some major recalls in tech history. Now. A
lot of them have to do with the automotive industry,
and that makes a lot of sense vehicles are potentially
extremely dangerous, right. I mean both to the people who
are inside the vehicles and especially to the people who
are outside of them. Flaws and such in a vehicle
(01:31):
can contribute to catastrophic scenarios, and this has made far
more complicated because it's not like every car is made
from the wheels up by a single manufacturer, right. A
lot of components are coming from different suppliers. So it
could be that the automaker is doing absolutely everything right,
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but a component that they're getting from a supplier has
a flaw in it, and that's enough to create a
dangerous situation. Of course, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
studied car accidents and found that the overwhelming majority of
them result from driver error. Only a tiny percentage of
accidents that the NHTSA reported on were actually caused by
(02:14):
vehicular problems. But if the problem could possibly lead to harm,
it only makes sense to fix the problem. Right. We
can't fix drivers necessarily, we can't make them all much
more responsible and careful, but what we can do is
identify and eliminate issues that can lead to dangerous situations
(02:35):
on the road. So we're going to learn about some
product recalls and how they all played out. And the
very first one I'd like to cover comes from the
same decade that I come from, the nineteen seventies, the
nineteen hundreds. Boy, I come from the nineteen hundreds. That
feels weird anyway. The product is the Little Wonder TV antenna,
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which was a product that was manufactured by a company
called the Akli Trick Corporation out of Brooklyn, New York. Now,
for those of y'all who have never had a TV antenna,
let me explain, before cable and before satellite television, and
before internet delivered television programming, there was over the air broadcasting,
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and actually there still is. I'm being a little facetious
here because some of y'all might take advantage of over
the air antennas to this day. I don't mean to
paint everyone with the same broad brush. Even in the
twenty first century, there are regions where cable TV isn't
available and satellite reception could be terrible due to stuff like,
you know, mountains and trees and that kind of thing.
If you don't have a clear view of the sky,
(03:40):
then you can't really pick up satellite signals. So sometimes
over the air broadcast is how you get your your
entertainment with over the air broadcasting. A television broadcaster beams
TV signals via radio waves. It's part of the radio spectrum,
and the television station uses a big, old transmitter antenna
to blast out those waves, and they travel outward in
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all directions, and they get progressively weaker as they travel outward.
If you are close enough to pick up the signal
while it's still of decent enough strength, then your receptor
antenna you're receiving antenna will collect those radio waves and
convert them into an electrical signal, and your television processes
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this electrical signal and you can watch your programs, you
can watch your stories. For some reason, I'm imagining it's
more commendy, and I might just be channeling my own
childhood at this point, because I certainly had televisions that
relied on over the air broadcasts for quite some time.
I didn't get cable till the eighties. Anyway, the little
wonder TV antenna would draw power from an electrical outlet
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in the home in order to amplify the incoming radio
signals that were going to the television. Now, not all
television antennas do this. Many antennas are non amplified. You
just connect them to your TV and that's it. But
the whole concept behind amplification is that you take an
incoming week signal and through the use of an electrical current,
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you boost that into a much stronger signal. But amplification
is a tricky thing. It's a tricky thing for me
to say, I'm recording this at the end of the
day rather than at the beginning, so I'm tripping over myself.
But amplification can be tricky because with television antennas, you're
amplifying everything that's coming in. You know, that doesn't just
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include the signal you want. Right Like you've tuned your
television to a specific channel, your antenna is picking up
all the different frequencies and there can be noise that's
included in the same frequency band as the channel that
you're tuning to. And for that reason, a lot of
resources actually suggest that if you do depend upon an
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over the air antenna to get your television programming, that
you first try it in a non amplified capacity before
switching it to an amplified version, because it just might
be that the non amplified approach works better for you,
you know, otherwise you might just end up amplifying all
the noise, and yeah, the TV signal stronger, but so
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is everything else, and so you still can't see anything anyway.
In some places, an amplifier is necessary to boost a
signal to great enough strength to make TV programming watchable.
So here we have the Little Wonder TV antenna and
it's plugged into the wall. So what necessitated the product
recall in nineteen seventy three, Well, the US Consumer Product
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Safety Commission, which we will mention multiple times in this episode,
found that the Little Wonder TV antenna lacked a safety
device that would isolate the electrical current from the home
outlet where it was plugged in to the antenna itself,
which meant that it was possible through normal operation of
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the antenna. Like let's say that you were like, oh,
I need to move the bunny ears so I can
get a better signal, you could actually get an electrical shock.
You could even suffer electrocution. Electrocution is death through an
electrical shock, and that's obviously a severe health hazard. So
the CPSC urged the Federal Trade Commission or FTC to
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investigate Ak Electric Corporation, alleging that the company had used
quote misleading and possibly fraudulent advertising end quote for their product,
and their recommendation was for people who had bought this
thing to unplug the antenna from the wall first of all,
then to disconnect the antenna from their television, then to
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toss the antenna in the trash. Pretty phenomenal. Now going
from an early example to a much more recent one,
A famous recall that happened less than a decade ago
was the Samsung Galaxy Note seven fablet. Do you remember fablets?
We don't use that word much anymore, but those are
like the very large smart phone somehow, like you know,
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kind of like a the love child between a phone
and a tablet. And this was a doozy of a recall,
and I'm sure a lot of you actually remember when
this happened. It wasn't that long ago. The problem quickly
reached a point where here in the United States, the
TSA and the Department of Transportation, as well as airlines
all around the world, would begin to deny passengers entry
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onto a plane if they were carrying a Galaxy Note seven.
The problems would lead to an incredibly expensive recall. They
even played a small part in the impeachment of South
Korea's president. So what the heck happened? Well, first, Samsung
was pushing the Note seven pretty darn hart. The company
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had a couple of Android smartphone flagship lines. There was
the Galaxy S series, then you had the higher end,
larger Galaxy Note series, And like a lot of smartphone manufacturers,
Samsung designated different generations of these phones with a number
after the name, But the Note and the S series
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were one number off from each other. The S was
a generation ahead of the Note, so when the S
six came out, the Note five was coming out. So
after the Galaxy Note five, Samsung decided they were going
to give six a skip. They go straight to the
Galaxy Note seven. This was kind of in an era
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in which tech companies were skipping numbers in their product lines.
It kind of makes me think I should write a
science fiction novel set in an alternate universe where everyone
has a Samsung Galaxy Note six or an iPhone nine
and they all work on Windows nine machines. But anyway,
Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Note seven on August second. They
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launched it on August nineteen, This is in twenty sixteen,
and they showed off a ton of new features in
the phone. They built up anticipation for it, particularly in
South Korea, where the sales were going pretty darn well.
But on August twenty fourth, less than a week after
the phone had launched, the first report of a Galaxy
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Note seven catching fire made the news, and it wouldn't
be the last time. On September second, Samsung announced a
recall of two and a half million Galaxy Notes seven
units and said the problem was with a faulty battery.
They blamed a supplier that had supplied the batteries for
these two and a half million units. Customers had the
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option of either getting a replacement so they could turn
their phone in and they would get a new phone
with a different battery in it, or they could get
a refund. Less than a week later, on September eighth,
the United States FAA told airlines to alert customers who
had a Galaxy Note seven that they were not to
charge or to turn on their devices during flight. The
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very next day, the US can Consumer Products Safety Commission
there they are again. They released a statement saying people
should not be using the phone full stop, whether you're
on a plane or not. The agency later would issue
a full recall on September fifteenth. Now, Samsung was trying
to address the problems and keep the Galaxy Note seven afloat.
The company planned to start selling the phones again in
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South Korea starting on September twenty eighth. However, before that happened,
news reports from China stated that there were also issues
with the Note seven catching fire and exploding in China.
Now this was very concerning, not just because obviously you
don't want your product exploding and hurting your customers, but
because the batteries in the Chinese phones actually came from
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a different supplier, right, And remember Samsung had said that
it was the supplier that had sent faulty batteries, but
now this was a different supplier. What was going on here?
And Samsung did start selling phones again in South Korea
and issuing replacements for US customers, but the problems didn't stop.
The replacements would have similar issues to the original phones.
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They still would catch fire or sometimes explode. On October sixth,
a Southwest Airline flight in the United States had to
be evacuated when a Galaxy Note seven that was on
board the plane began to start smoking. More reports of
overheating phones would follow. US carriers announced they would stop
selling the phone, like phone carrier said, we're gonna curtail
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selling this phone, and they start they'd stop issuing replacements too,
like they would stop replacing older Note sevens older by
like a week with newer ones. So on October eleventh,
Samsung issued a statement saying the company was investigating the
issue and recommended that all Galaxy Note seven owners powered
down their phones and to stop using them. That's a
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message you definitely don't want to give when you're a manufacturer,
is to stop using our product. The investigation revealed that
the early Galaxy Note seven models had a problem with
a battery that was too large for the phone that
it was inside. Essentially, the battery was big because Samsung
wanted to make sure that the battery life was sufficient
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to give you a full charge for a day. But
remember this is a fablet. It's a smartphone with a
really big screen. I mean that's a power hungry device.
So these batteries would fit in the very slim form
factor of the Galaxy Note seven, but only just and
it was such a snug fit that it could squash
the negative electrodes on the battery to come into contact
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with the positive electrodes through making contact with a conductive
element in the phone itself. And this is where we
have to talk about stuff like short circuits and thermal runaway.
So normally, in a circuit, you have a path like
a circuit is just a pathway, right, and ultimately the
pathway has terminations at a negative terminal and a positive terminal,
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and electricity flows through this pathway and it does some
sort of work along the way. Whatever the circuit is for,
it does the work of that circuit. But if you
were to create a direct connection between the negative and
positive terminals that bypass this whole pathway, well, the electricity
would have a much easier and shorter path to take,
and it would do that and there's no work that's doing.
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There'd be no governing elements to put a check on
the flow of electricity. You would have a short circuit,
and the electrochemical reactions in the battery would give off
more and more heat. They are exothermic reactions, and eventually
you would get hot enough where you could potentially have
a structural failure of the battery itself and a potential
fire or explosion on your hands. That appeared to be
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the issue with the first set of phones. The tight
fit of the battery really seemed to be to blame.
But that's not the end of the story. We're going
to take a quick break. When we come back, I'll
finish up on Samsung. We'll talk about some other recalls
as well, but first let's think our sponsors. Okay, we're back.
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So Samsung engineers thought that they had identified and then
addressed the exploding battery issue by switching to handsets that
had batteries that were made by a different supplier, because surely,
if it was a manufacturing error that came from one supplier,
the other supplier should be cushioned against that. However, the
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pressure to get replacements off the assembly line and into
customers hands as quickly as possible perhaps contributed to a
scenario where there were more manufacturing issues different ones, But
there were still manufacturing issues with the batteries themselves. So
this time the manufacturing errors in the batteries created a
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situation in which some batteries had the positive electrode make
contact with the negative one inside the battery really like
the positive part of the battery and the negative part
of the battery would get squished together so tightly that
there would be contact inside the battery instead of separation
like you're supposed to keep it separated. Otherwise you still
have a short circuit. Well it had a short circuit,
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so in the end you still had batteries catching fire
and exploding, and Samsung would recall millions of handsets and
they had to take a loss on the entire generation
of the Galaxy Note smartphone. Samsung would continue to make
more handsets in the Galaxy Note line, but they released
the final one in twenty twenty with the Galaxy Note
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twenty so and that wasn't the twentieth generation. They just
gave that the name because it was coming out in
twenty twenty. The cost of the Galaxy Note seven recall
was in the billions of dollars, and there were lawsuits
brought against Samsung related to the battery incidents, so that
was even more cost on top of just the expense
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of replacing these phones and then ultimately recalling a refunding.
The scrutiny that followed the scandal may have contributed to
a massive political change in South Korea. Now I stress
may so I'm going to explain what happened, but keep
in mind, like the Samsung Note seven thing, if anything,
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was just sort of an early event that led to
more scrutiny on the company itself. So Samsung is what's
called a chable, meaning it's a company, a Korean company
that ultimately is run by a very powerful individual or family.
In Samsung's case, it's a family. One member of that family,
the one presumed to be the heir of Samsung, the
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person who will inherit it is Lee Jay Yong. And
in early twenty seventeen, Lee Jayyong was arrested on charges
of bribing a confidant to the president of South Korea.
That case went well beyond Samsung, and it was not
just Samsung that was thought to have participated in bribery,
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but Samsung played a big part in this scandal. So
the scandal was huge, and ultimately Lee j Young was
found guilty on all charges and sentenced to five years
in prison. He served a year and then the court
eventually reduced his sentence and then suspended the remaining amount
and he was released. But he did spend a year
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in prison. South Korea's president was impeached as a result
of this massive scandal. She was shown the door. So
while the exploding phones didn't directly contribute to that story,
you could argue they brought unwanted attention to Samsung's activities
and that's what led people to discover this case of bribery.
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If you're wondering what the bribery was all about. Allegedly
it was about bribing the president so that a big
merger could go through for Samsung, essentially greasing the wheels.
Samsung would argue that there was no bribery. There was
just a customary gift, something that was just, you know,
just a custom in South Korea. But the courts did
not agree with that particular defense, So there we have it. Now.
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Sometimes a tech recall isn't for the tech part of
the product, not necessarily directly anyway, but it's still something
that poses as a potential hazard or legal liability. That
was partly the case for Toyota, with one of the
costliest recalls ever at that point. Though to be fair,
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this recall also segues into some other related recalls, like
two other ones, one of which related to a very
similar problem, and this was happening really around late two
thousand and nine. That's when Toyota and the National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration or NHTSA, responded to reports that some
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Toyota owners had experienced what was called unintended acceleration, which
is the car would go when no go was really
the desired outcome, but then cargo when it should no go.
Toyota had been through this before, actually two years earlier.
In two thousand and seven, Toyota discovered that its optional
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all weather floor mats had the potential to slide around
if unsecured, and that it could mean the mat could
slide and snag the accelerator pedal, thus holding the pedal
down even after the driver would lift their foot off
of the pedal. So the company swiftly issued a recall
for around fifty five thousand vehicles that had these all
weather mats back in two thousand and seven. In two
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thousand and nine, the problem was larger than all weather mats.
It appeared to be an issue with millions of Toyota
and Lexus vehicles. Floor mats on the driver side could
similarly snag and trap the accelerator pedal, so the company
issued a wide recall, but at least for a subset
of vehicles. This solution of removing the floor mat didn't
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fully address the problem, so in early twenty ten, Toyota
issued another recall, this time for faulty accelerator pedals themselves.
The shape of the pedal appeared to be the problem.
The pedal could catch on the floorboard and it could
stay down. Most but not all, of the recalled vehicles
were also under the recall for the driver matt issue,
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so Toyota and the NHTSA had a bit of a
spat about this. The car company initially insisted that the
floor mats were the beginning and end of the problem,
and the NHTSA kept saying the problem hasn't been fixed yet. Now.
There were other issues as well that Toyota had to
address with its various vehicles, but the floor mat slash
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faulty accelerator pedal. Those flaws cropped up and stayed an
issue into early twenty eleven, and they necessitated several recalls
of various Toyota vehicles. The company and its dealerships incurred
billions of dollars in costs as result of these recalls. Moreover,
the company's image took a big hit, and in the end,
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while the problem had the potential to cause accidents, very
few incidents were ever reported. To learn more about the
media hype that surrounded the problem, I recommend reading Robert E.
Cole's twenty eleven pieces in The Atlantic. It as the
title who was really at fault? For the Toyota recalls?
Because it's a complicated story, Like, there was definitely an
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issue there, and a potentially very dangerous issue, but there
were a lot of players in the space that complicated
things beyond how they already were. So Toyota has also
been affected by another recall, one that affected eighteen other
auto makers and more than thirty brands of cars. So
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I'm talking about air bags made by a part supplier
called Takata. A fault was found in Takata air bags
that could lead to accidental and explosive deployment, and this
could also include the air bags rupturing and the explosion
propelling dangerous or even deadly shrapnel into a vehicle. Multiple
people died as a result of this over the course
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of several different years. So the issue originated with the
inflator for the air bags, the actual device responsible for
pushing gas into the air bag at an incredible speed.
So the inflators used a propellant of ammonium nitrate, and
the propellant that Takata was using in these early steel
inflators did not have a chemical drying agent, a desiccant
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in other words, and that meant that in humid environments,
moisture could affect the propellant and high temperatures could make
this very very reactive. So here in the United States,
the NHTSA identified a few regions as being more conducive
to the environmental factors that have an impact and make
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these things more dangerous. It's dangerous no matter where you are,
but there's certain areas where because of the climate, it's
more likely to happen. So that includes the southeastern United States,
including my home state of Georgia, as well as the
state of Hawaii and a few other places. So they
kind of divided up the United States into three zones,
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with each zone having a certain level of risk, and
the zone my states and is in the highest risk. Now,
the problem has been around since the late nineteen nineties.
There were models from like model year ninety eight or
ninety nine that were included in the various recalls eventually,
and there were vehicles as recent as the model year
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twenty sixteen that were part of this. Around sixty seven
million airbags are affected by this recall or the series
of recalls here in the United States. Global figures are
closer to one hundred million. The NHTSA says at least
twenty seven people have died from these exploding airbags, more
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than four hundred had been injured due to them, and
Takata in twenty fifteen said it was aware of eighty
four ruptures occurring since two thousand and two, So it
very much is a thing. Are the odds high that
it could happen to you if you happen to be
driving one of these vehicles? Not necessarily, I mean, it
depends upon where you live and the conditions of the
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environment as to whether or not you know your vehicle
might be vulnerable. But it's a really good reason to
check to see if your vehicle has been affected by
this recall because you can actually take your vehicle to
a dealership to have the air bags replaced for free.
That is part of the deal that Takata agreed to
in order to fix this massive problem. Now of great
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concern is the timeline of not only when the airbags
were incorporated into vehicles, but when Takata engineers first became
aware that there was a problem in the first place. So,
according to a twenty fourteen article in The New York Times,
Takata workers first began to test their air bags for
possible deficiencies way back in two thousand and four, because
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that was when an airbag had apparently deployed spontaneously and
propelled debris at a driver in Alabama. Apparently, the workers
found that the inflators they were using were not as
resilient as they thought they were. But the company would
actually wait four years before filing a report about faulty
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air bag systems with regulators, So between two thousand and
four and two thousand and eight, according to The New
York Times, Takata knew about this but kept quiet about
the issue, putting potentially hundreds of thousands of people, maybe
even millions, at risk. Now, Takata's two thousand and eight
filing prompted a recall in two thousand and eight, one
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that covered several car makes and models, across multiple automakers.
This is what I was talking about earlier, Like, automakers
don't make everything that goes into their vehicles, So if
a manufacturer that creates a critical component does a bad
job of it, it can affect cars across numerous car manufacturers,
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not just one. The list of cars affected actually grew
year by year, Like it was one of those things
where the story got worse the longer it went, where
Takata would say, Oh, it turns out these types of
airbags or airbags that are similar enough where they can
have the same problem can also be found in these
other vehicles on top of all the ones we've already
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listed that kept happening year after year. Again, the NHTSA
really was focusing on regions that were more likely to
have hot and humid weather. Because there's only so much
you could do so quickly, right, Like, this is a
critical piece in a car's safety systems and it needs
to be addressed, but you can only make air bags
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so quickly. You can only make the replacements at a
certain speed, And so there was a bottle there. You
couldn't get the airbags to dealerships fast enough to be
able to meet the needs of all the people who
had cars that had these air bags in them. In
November twenty fourteen, the NHTSA called for a national recall,
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and by spring twenty fifteen, the number of vehicles affected
by the recall had reached thirty three point eight million
in the United States. That summer, Reuters reported that some
of the replaced airbags still had faulty inflators in them
and that they would need to be replaced again. And
by some I mean like four hundred thousand or so.
While all this was going on, there were still incidents
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involving air bags deploying prematurely, sometimes leading to deaths. This
was a terrible situation. You had this great sense of
urgency to have these faulty air bags replaced. You had
this bottleneck in airbag production and delivery. The supply chain
just couldn't keep up with the need to replace all
of these Because this was, you know, affecting cars across
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multiple years of manufacturing. It wasn't like it was one
fleet of cars, it was several. An effort was made
to prioritize the specific regions of vehicles that were most
found to be vulnerable, but it still was a real challenge,
and there was a challenge in communicating all of this
to the public. The NHTSA has gone so far as
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to issue a do not drive advisory for certain vehicles,
stating that owners should prioritize having their cars repaired, which
dealerships should perform for free. Takata would face hefty fines
in lawsuits and eventually had to file for bankruptcy in
twenty seventeen, which is not a big surprise because the
last estimates I saw for the total cost of the
recall is somewhere in the neighborhood of like twenty four
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billion dollars. In twenty eighteen, Takata submitted a plan that
included a trust fund established for people who had been
directly affected by airbag explosions. Because these were still an
issue and the number of vehicles recalled continued to grow
and it's very much ongoing. There are still vehicles on
the road right now that have these old Takata air
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bags installed. The NHTSA recommends the driver's check to make
sure their older vehicles aren't on the list of models
affected by this issue, and if they are, that you
then take the vehicle in to get that free airbag replacement.
Considering this summer here in the United States has already
seen record temperatures, my feeling is that even people who
live in states that aren't traditionally associated with high heat
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and humidity should probably double check to make sure their
vehicle is in the clear. Here in the US. You
can go and do that by visiting the website in
HTSA dot gov. Submitting the state and license plate number
of your vehicle or your vehicle's ven will tell you
if there are any unrepaired recalls associated with your specific vehicle.
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It's a quick way to check that could save you
from injury or worse. So I highly recommend doing it,
Like just check and see if you're fortunate there won't
be anything there, and then it'll tell you there are
zero unresolved repairs anything like that, and that's awesome. It's
great peace of mind. According to numerous sources, there's still
are millions of affected vehicles on the road today. Okay,
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we're going to take another quick break and then we'll
come back to finish up this discussion about tech recalls.
We're back. So not all tech recalls necessitate a return
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to a manufacturer or a dealership or something like that.
Some can be addressed through software updates that are pushed
out over the air. That was the case with the
Google Nest smoke detector. In early January twenty fourteen, Google
completed an acquisition of the Nest company, best known for
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their thermostats, and a few months later, Nest engineers realized
that the Nest Protect Smoke plus carbon monoxide alarm had
a feature that could lead to dangerous situations, and that
feature was called Nest Wave. As the name implies, this
was a gesture control system, so the idea was that
you could wave at an alarm in order to shut
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it off. So imagine you're in your kitchen. You're toasting
some bread, but you forgot that the day before you
toasted a bagel, so you had the toaster set higher
than you normally would, and your bread starts to burn,
and the smoke detector goes off, and you eject your toast,
and then you're waving frantically at the smoke alarm to
stop it from making that terrible noise, which seems like
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a pretty cool feature and definitely easier than like getting
a step ladder out so you can reach the reset button.
At the center of an alarm, or do what I do,
which is where you grab a nearby broom and use
the handle to kind of poke that button. But there's
a problem with this gesture system, and that is that
the nest Wave had the potential to pick up on
gestures that were not intended to be a command to
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shut the alarm off, and the device might not sound
at all if it happens to be in the presence
of somebody who is waving their hands around while there's
some smoke. I'm reminded of a friend of mine who
is extremely expressive and she talks with her hands. If
she was on the phone, one hand would be holding
the phone to her ear, the other hand would be
(33:13):
gesturing wildly. Well, if in the background something had caught
fire and the smoke detector had picked up on it,
it might see her gesturing and think, oh, she's got
this handled because she's waving me to shut up. That's
not great. So Google promptly issued a recall affecting more
than four hundred thousand smoke alarms, and the company issued
a software update to disable the nest Wave functionality. There
(33:35):
you got your problem solved. Now you can no longer
turn off the alarm just by waving at it. So
this recall was a necessary regulatory step, but it did
not mean that customers actually had to send their alarms
into Google for replacement. They just needed to make sure
their alarm was connected to the internet in order to
receive the software update. Nest said it received no reports
(33:57):
of the issues leading to injury or property damage, which
is good. There are lots of other tech recall stories
that essentially end with software updates. Quite a few with
Tesla have gone that way. All of the ones we're
going to talk about with the cyber truck are more
about bringing the truck in to have something physically addressed.
(34:17):
Well again, we'll get to that before the end. So
we've got one other one I want to chat about
before we get to cyber trucks, and that is a
thing that was a little tech gadget. It was a
giveaway in happy Meals at McDonald's in twenty sixteen, and
it became a big pr headache. So in twenty sixteen,
McDonald's introduced a couple of fitness tracker type things. They
(34:39):
were called the steppe It Activity wristbands. These were not
sophisticated by any means. But you wouldn't expect them to
be sophisticated either, right, because it's a giveaway. It's a
kid's toy in a happy meal. It's not going to
be some sort of expensive gadget. They were essentially pedometers,
and they were not particularly good from what I understand.
I read a review of one, I think it was wired,
(35:01):
and it said it was strangely very sensitive to non
steps and not so sensitive to actual steps. But they
looked like toy smart watches, right, They kind of looked like,
you know, a very cartoonish smart watch, but that's kind
of what they look like. The promotion with the toy
fitness trackers began on August ninth of twenty sixteen, but
(35:22):
before very long, some parents were reporting that their kids
were getting rashes or blisters or even burns after wearing
the tracker for just a short while. In fact, according
to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, our old friends over there,
there were more than seventy reports of such cases. Now,
(35:43):
obviously that's a very bad look, and McDonald's quickly issued
a recall for all thirty three million of these things
they had purchased them from China and apparently there were
some real issues. Whether it was chemicals on the thing
that were causing it or some other issue. I can't say.
I'm guessing it's a chemical thing, like probably similar to
(36:04):
I have a nickel allergy, so if I wear something
that's got nickel on it against my skin, I get blisters.
So by August seventeenth, the wristbands were gone from Happy Meals.
They'd only been there for a little less than two weeks.
So the incident prompted discussions as to whether the decision
to include the toy trackers in the first place was
(36:24):
even a good idea. Not that McDonald should have known
that these would potentially cause harm. That wasn't really the question.
It was more like, was this really just a cynical
attempt to make McDonald's appear to be more health conscious
because there were already criticisms leveled against the company regarding
the nutritional quality or lack thereof, of the food that
(36:46):
it was serving to people, and some critics said McDonald's
didn't really attempt to create a serious message around health
and wellness. They just included this as a toy because
they figured some kids would have seen their parents wearing
something similar and now they got to do it too.
Parents were encouraged to bring the wristbands back to McDonald's,
whereupon the company would replace the wristband with a different
(37:07):
happy meal toy, as well as a choice of either
yogurt or apple slices to compensate the children whose wrists
were potentially put in danger. I'm not sure how many
parents felt like saying I'm loving it by the end
of that day. And now we will finish by talking
about the Tesla cybertruck recalls. So the first recall was
(37:27):
a relatively small one. It happened in April twenty twenty four.
It did affect fewer than four thousand trucks. I mean,
four thousands a big number. But when we're talking about
the other recalls here, when we're chatting about the millions,
four thousand's not that bad. So what was the problem. Well,
the issue was a faulty accelerator pedal cover which could
fall off. And if the cover fell off, it created
(37:50):
the possibility of the accelerator pedal sticking against the interior
trim of the cyber truck. And so we get back
to an unintended acceleration problem similar to what happened in
the Toyota vehicles that I mentioned earlier. So Tesla issued
the recall, but it also said that the company didn't
have any record of any incidents happening due to this issue,
(38:13):
which is good, you know, considering the potential severity of
the problem. But you know, it's it's great that this
was solved before you know, any catastrophe could happen. However,
that was just the first of the Tesla cyber truck recalls.
There were two more since then, and again that just
that one happened in April of twenty twenty four. So
in June twenty twenty four, two Tesla recalls popped up
(38:36):
on the NHTSA website. So one was due to an
issue with exterior trim detaching from the side of the car,
which is an issue that affected like eleven three hundred
eighty three cyber trucks that were produced between November thirteenth,
twenty twenty three and May of twenty twenty four. The
second recall was for eleven thousand, six hundred eighty eight
(38:58):
vehicles and the problem was potentially a much more dangerous
one windshield wiper motor that could fail and just leave
the driver unable to clear their windshield in a rainstorm,
or what have you. The company said the issue was
quote a wiper motor whose gate driver may have been
damaged due to electrical overstress during functional testing end quote.
(39:19):
So I guess the message is we safety tested this
thing so hard that we made it unsafe that we
wore it out. That's kind of how I read that.
That might be an unfair reading. That's my own opinion,
So I just want to put that out there. But
according to posts on web forums, some cyber truck owners
had been waiting for a replacement wiper motor for weeks.
(39:40):
That's both frustrating and dangerous, depending upon what driving conditions
happened to be, right, Like, if it's boring down rain,
it's not really safe to drive your cyber truck if
the wiper motor isn't working. All that being said, I
think it's unfair to pick on any one automaker too
much when it comes to these recalls, because, like I said,
there's so many different components go into a finished vehicle,
(40:02):
and different suppliers are for lots of these different pieces, right,
and to expect everything to go perfectly all the time
from every supplier that's unrealistic. The key I think is
that companies need to be quick to acknowledge when there's
a problem and to have a solution ready to go.
It's important for all parties involved. It's definitely important for
(40:25):
customers who depend upon the reliability and safety of the
products that they're purchasing, but it's also important for the
companies if they want to avoid stuff like massive fines
and hefty class action lawsuits and like pr that's just
really bad for the company that tends to be also
bad for the stock price. So there's just a handful
of recalls and tech products and what caused them to happen. Ideally,
(40:51):
of course, a tech product is put through thorough testing
and all the major stuff gets worked out and if
if there's anything left over, it's minor and not hazardous.
But that's not how the real world works, right Either
there are urgent deadlines to meet and people start cutting
some corners, or you're depending upon products that were made
(41:13):
by someone else that you thought were reliable turns out
they're not. There are a lot of things that can
go into that, and so I don't want to put
too much blame. I know I am very hard on
Tesla in general, but I don't feel like that I
can make a case that Tesla did a bad job
with this. I think it's just unfortunate. I think the
cyber truck in general is unfortunate, but that's mostly due
(41:35):
to the fact that I still think it's really an
ugly vehicle. But that's my own personal opinion. Again, I
don't think it's necessarily bad. You would have to ask
someone who reviews cars for a living what they thought
of it and get that sort of data from them.
I am not the right person to ask. But yes,
that's a selection of recalls. I am going to sign
(41:59):
off for this episode. I am currently probably on my
way back to Atlanta as you listen to this because
I took a long weekend to celebrate my belated birthday.
I hope all of you had a great weekend, and
I will talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff
(42:22):
is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you? So recently I came across a headline
in the Register that read, and that's three recalls for
(00:26):
Tesla cybertruck in as many months. And from that headline
I infer the intent behind the wording is to say
the Tesla Cybertruck, even with all its numerous delays, was
still rushed off to consumers without going through a thorough
quality control process. Worse that, these issues are ones that
are bad enough to necessitate a recall, in which a
(00:48):
company requests that customers return purchase products due to some
flaw in the product itself, a flaw that could potentially
lead to harm. Are the very least legal liability for
the company. And we'll talk about the specific recalls for
the cyber truck toward the end of this episode, but
in the meantime, I thought it might be interesting to
(01:10):
talk about some major recalls in tech history. Now. A
lot of them have to do with the automotive industry,
and that makes a lot of sense vehicles are potentially
extremely dangerous, right. I mean both to the people who
are inside the vehicles and especially to the people who
are outside of them. Flaws and such in a vehicle
(01:31):
can contribute to catastrophic scenarios, and this has made far
more complicated because it's not like every car is made
from the wheels up by a single manufacturer, right. A
lot of components are coming from different suppliers. So it
could be that the automaker is doing absolutely everything right,
(01:51):
but a component that they're getting from a supplier has
a flaw in it, and that's enough to create a
dangerous situation. Of course, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
studied car accidents and found that the overwhelming majority of
them result from driver error. Only a tiny percentage of
accidents that the NHTSA reported on were actually caused by
(02:14):
vehicular problems. But if the problem could possibly lead to harm,
it only makes sense to fix the problem. Right. We
can't fix drivers necessarily, we can't make them all much
more responsible and careful, but what we can do is
identify and eliminate issues that can lead to dangerous situations
(02:35):
on the road. So we're going to learn about some
product recalls and how they all played out. And the
very first one I'd like to cover comes from the
same decade that I come from, the nineteen seventies, the
nineteen hundreds. Boy, I come from the nineteen hundreds. That
feels weird anyway. The product is the Little Wonder TV antenna,
(02:56):
which was a product that was manufactured by a company
called the Akli Trick Corporation out of Brooklyn, New York. Now,
for those of y'all who have never had a TV antenna,
let me explain, before cable and before satellite television, and
before internet delivered television programming, there was over the air broadcasting,
(03:18):
and actually there still is. I'm being a little facetious
here because some of y'all might take advantage of over
the air antennas to this day. I don't mean to
paint everyone with the same broad brush. Even in the
twenty first century, there are regions where cable TV isn't
available and satellite reception could be terrible due to stuff like,
you know, mountains and trees and that kind of thing.
If you don't have a clear view of the sky,
(03:40):
then you can't really pick up satellite signals. So sometimes
over the air broadcast is how you get your your
entertainment with over the air broadcasting. A television broadcaster beams
TV signals via radio waves. It's part of the radio spectrum,
and the television station uses a big, old transmitter antenna
to blast out those waves, and they travel outward in
(04:03):
all directions, and they get progressively weaker as they travel outward.
If you are close enough to pick up the signal
while it's still of decent enough strength, then your receptor
antenna you're receiving antenna will collect those radio waves and
convert them into an electrical signal, and your television processes
(04:24):
this electrical signal and you can watch your programs, you
can watch your stories. For some reason, I'm imagining it's
more commendy, and I might just be channeling my own
childhood at this point, because I certainly had televisions that
relied on over the air broadcasts for quite some time.
I didn't get cable till the eighties. Anyway, the little
wonder TV antenna would draw power from an electrical outlet
(04:47):
in the home in order to amplify the incoming radio
signals that were going to the television. Now, not all
television antennas do this. Many antennas are non amplified. You
just connect them to your TV and that's it. But
the whole concept behind amplification is that you take an
incoming week signal and through the use of an electrical current,
(05:09):
you boost that into a much stronger signal. But amplification
is a tricky thing. It's a tricky thing for me
to say, I'm recording this at the end of the
day rather than at the beginning, so I'm tripping over myself.
But amplification can be tricky because with television antennas, you're
amplifying everything that's coming in. You know, that doesn't just
(05:30):
include the signal you want. Right Like you've tuned your
television to a specific channel, your antenna is picking up
all the different frequencies and there can be noise that's
included in the same frequency band as the channel that
you're tuning to. And for that reason, a lot of
resources actually suggest that if you do depend upon an
(05:51):
over the air antenna to get your television programming, that
you first try it in a non amplified capacity before
switching it to an amplified version, because it just might
be that the non amplified approach works better for you,
you know, otherwise you might just end up amplifying all
the noise, and yeah, the TV signal stronger, but so
(06:12):
is everything else, and so you still can't see anything anyway.
In some places, an amplifier is necessary to boost a
signal to great enough strength to make TV programming watchable.
So here we have the Little Wonder TV antenna and
it's plugged into the wall. So what necessitated the product
recall in nineteen seventy three, Well, the US Consumer Product
(06:35):
Safety Commission, which we will mention multiple times in this episode,
found that the Little Wonder TV antenna lacked a safety
device that would isolate the electrical current from the home
outlet where it was plugged in to the antenna itself,
which meant that it was possible through normal operation of
(06:55):
the antenna. Like let's say that you were like, oh,
I need to move the bunny ears so I can
get a better signal, you could actually get an electrical shock.
You could even suffer electrocution. Electrocution is death through an
electrical shock, and that's obviously a severe health hazard. So
the CPSC urged the Federal Trade Commission or FTC to
(07:18):
investigate Ak Electric Corporation, alleging that the company had used
quote misleading and possibly fraudulent advertising end quote for their product,
and their recommendation was for people who had bought this
thing to unplug the antenna from the wall first of all,
then to disconnect the antenna from their television, then to
(07:38):
toss the antenna in the trash. Pretty phenomenal. Now going
from an early example to a much more recent one,
A famous recall that happened less than a decade ago
was the Samsung Galaxy Note seven fablet. Do you remember fablets?
We don't use that word much anymore, but those are
like the very large smart phone somehow, like you know,
(08:01):
kind of like a the love child between a phone
and a tablet. And this was a doozy of a recall,
and I'm sure a lot of you actually remember when
this happened. It wasn't that long ago. The problem quickly
reached a point where here in the United States, the
TSA and the Department of Transportation, as well as airlines
all around the world, would begin to deny passengers entry
(08:22):
onto a plane if they were carrying a Galaxy Note seven.
The problems would lead to an incredibly expensive recall. They
even played a small part in the impeachment of South
Korea's president. So what the heck happened? Well, first, Samsung
was pushing the Note seven pretty darn hart. The company
(08:45):
had a couple of Android smartphone flagship lines. There was
the Galaxy S series, then you had the higher end,
larger Galaxy Note series, And like a lot of smartphone manufacturers,
Samsung designated different generations of these phones with a number
after the name, But the Note and the S series
(09:07):
were one number off from each other. The S was
a generation ahead of the Note, so when the S
six came out, the Note five was coming out. So
after the Galaxy Note five, Samsung decided they were going
to give six a skip. They go straight to the
Galaxy Note seven. This was kind of in an era
(09:29):
in which tech companies were skipping numbers in their product lines.
It kind of makes me think I should write a
science fiction novel set in an alternate universe where everyone
has a Samsung Galaxy Note six or an iPhone nine
and they all work on Windows nine machines. But anyway,
Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Note seven on August second. They
(09:51):
launched it on August nineteen, This is in twenty sixteen,
and they showed off a ton of new features in
the phone. They built up anticipation for it, particularly in
South Korea, where the sales were going pretty darn well.
But on August twenty fourth, less than a week after
the phone had launched, the first report of a Galaxy
(10:12):
Note seven catching fire made the news, and it wouldn't
be the last time. On September second, Samsung announced a
recall of two and a half million Galaxy Notes seven
units and said the problem was with a faulty battery.
They blamed a supplier that had supplied the batteries for
these two and a half million units. Customers had the
(10:35):
option of either getting a replacement so they could turn
their phone in and they would get a new phone
with a different battery in it, or they could get
a refund. Less than a week later, on September eighth,
the United States FAA told airlines to alert customers who
had a Galaxy Note seven that they were not to
charge or to turn on their devices during flight. The
(10:58):
very next day, the US can Consumer Products Safety Commission
there they are again. They released a statement saying people
should not be using the phone full stop, whether you're
on a plane or not. The agency later would issue
a full recall on September fifteenth. Now, Samsung was trying
to address the problems and keep the Galaxy Note seven afloat.
The company planned to start selling the phones again in
(11:19):
South Korea starting on September twenty eighth. However, before that happened,
news reports from China stated that there were also issues
with the Note seven catching fire and exploding in China.
Now this was very concerning, not just because obviously you
don't want your product exploding and hurting your customers, but
because the batteries in the Chinese phones actually came from
(11:43):
a different supplier, right, And remember Samsung had said that
it was the supplier that had sent faulty batteries, but
now this was a different supplier. What was going on here?
And Samsung did start selling phones again in South Korea
and issuing replacements for US customers, but the problems didn't stop.
The replacements would have similar issues to the original phones.
(12:07):
They still would catch fire or sometimes explode. On October sixth,
a Southwest Airline flight in the United States had to
be evacuated when a Galaxy Note seven that was on
board the plane began to start smoking. More reports of
overheating phones would follow. US carriers announced they would stop
selling the phone, like phone carrier said, we're gonna curtail
(12:30):
selling this phone, and they start they'd stop issuing replacements too,
like they would stop replacing older Note sevens older by
like a week with newer ones. So on October eleventh,
Samsung issued a statement saying the company was investigating the
issue and recommended that all Galaxy Note seven owners powered
down their phones and to stop using them. That's a
(12:51):
message you definitely don't want to give when you're a manufacturer,
is to stop using our product. The investigation revealed that
the early Galaxy Note seven models had a problem with
a battery that was too large for the phone that
it was inside. Essentially, the battery was big because Samsung
wanted to make sure that the battery life was sufficient
(13:12):
to give you a full charge for a day. But
remember this is a fablet. It's a smartphone with a
really big screen. I mean that's a power hungry device.
So these batteries would fit in the very slim form
factor of the Galaxy Note seven, but only just and
it was such a snug fit that it could squash
the negative electrodes on the battery to come into contact
(13:35):
with the positive electrodes through making contact with a conductive
element in the phone itself. And this is where we
have to talk about stuff like short circuits and thermal runaway.
So normally, in a circuit, you have a path like
a circuit is just a pathway, right, and ultimately the
pathway has terminations at a negative terminal and a positive terminal,
(13:57):
and electricity flows through this pathway and it does some
sort of work along the way. Whatever the circuit is for,
it does the work of that circuit. But if you
were to create a direct connection between the negative and
positive terminals that bypass this whole pathway, well, the electricity
would have a much easier and shorter path to take,
and it would do that and there's no work that's doing.
(14:20):
There'd be no governing elements to put a check on
the flow of electricity. You would have a short circuit,
and the electrochemical reactions in the battery would give off
more and more heat. They are exothermic reactions, and eventually
you would get hot enough where you could potentially have
a structural failure of the battery itself and a potential
fire or explosion on your hands. That appeared to be
(14:42):
the issue with the first set of phones. The tight
fit of the battery really seemed to be to blame.
But that's not the end of the story. We're going
to take a quick break. When we come back, I'll
finish up on Samsung. We'll talk about some other recalls
as well, but first let's think our sponsors. Okay, we're back.
(15:09):
So Samsung engineers thought that they had identified and then
addressed the exploding battery issue by switching to handsets that
had batteries that were made by a different supplier, because surely,
if it was a manufacturing error that came from one supplier,
the other supplier should be cushioned against that. However, the
(15:33):
pressure to get replacements off the assembly line and into
customers hands as quickly as possible perhaps contributed to a
scenario where there were more manufacturing issues different ones, But
there were still manufacturing issues with the batteries themselves. So
this time the manufacturing errors in the batteries created a
(15:53):
situation in which some batteries had the positive electrode make
contact with the negative one inside the battery really like
the positive part of the battery and the negative part
of the battery would get squished together so tightly that
there would be contact inside the battery instead of separation
like you're supposed to keep it separated. Otherwise you still
have a short circuit. Well it had a short circuit,
(16:15):
so in the end you still had batteries catching fire
and exploding, and Samsung would recall millions of handsets and
they had to take a loss on the entire generation
of the Galaxy Note smartphone. Samsung would continue to make
more handsets in the Galaxy Note line, but they released
the final one in twenty twenty with the Galaxy Note
(16:35):
twenty so and that wasn't the twentieth generation. They just
gave that the name because it was coming out in
twenty twenty. The cost of the Galaxy Note seven recall
was in the billions of dollars, and there were lawsuits
brought against Samsung related to the battery incidents, so that
was even more cost on top of just the expense
(16:55):
of replacing these phones and then ultimately recalling a refunding.
The scrutiny that followed the scandal may have contributed to
a massive political change in South Korea. Now I stress
may so I'm going to explain what happened, but keep
in mind, like the Samsung Note seven thing, if anything,
(17:16):
was just sort of an early event that led to
more scrutiny on the company itself. So Samsung is what's
called a chable, meaning it's a company, a Korean company
that ultimately is run by a very powerful individual or family.
In Samsung's case, it's a family. One member of that family,
the one presumed to be the heir of Samsung, the
(17:39):
person who will inherit it is Lee Jay Yong. And
in early twenty seventeen, Lee Jayyong was arrested on charges
of bribing a confidant to the president of South Korea.
That case went well beyond Samsung, and it was not
just Samsung that was thought to have participated in bribery,
(18:01):
but Samsung played a big part in this scandal. So
the scandal was huge, and ultimately Lee j Young was
found guilty on all charges and sentenced to five years
in prison. He served a year and then the court
eventually reduced his sentence and then suspended the remaining amount
and he was released. But he did spend a year
(18:23):
in prison. South Korea's president was impeached as a result
of this massive scandal. She was shown the door. So
while the exploding phones didn't directly contribute to that story,
you could argue they brought unwanted attention to Samsung's activities
and that's what led people to discover this case of bribery.
(18:45):
If you're wondering what the bribery was all about. Allegedly
it was about bribing the president so that a big
merger could go through for Samsung, essentially greasing the wheels.
Samsung would argue that there was no bribery. There was
just a customary gift, something that was just, you know,
just a custom in South Korea. But the courts did
not agree with that particular defense, So there we have it. Now.
(19:09):
Sometimes a tech recall isn't for the tech part of
the product, not necessarily directly anyway, but it's still something
that poses as a potential hazard or legal liability. That
was partly the case for Toyota, with one of the
costliest recalls ever at that point. Though to be fair,
(19:29):
this recall also segues into some other related recalls, like
two other ones, one of which related to a very
similar problem, and this was happening really around late two
thousand and nine. That's when Toyota and the National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration or NHTSA, responded to reports that some
(19:52):
Toyota owners had experienced what was called unintended acceleration, which
is the car would go when no go was really
the desired outcome, but then cargo when it should no go.
Toyota had been through this before, actually two years earlier.
In two thousand and seven, Toyota discovered that its optional
(20:13):
all weather floor mats had the potential to slide around
if unsecured, and that it could mean the mat could
slide and snag the accelerator pedal, thus holding the pedal
down even after the driver would lift their foot off
of the pedal. So the company swiftly issued a recall
for around fifty five thousand vehicles that had these all
weather mats back in two thousand and seven. In two
(20:35):
thousand and nine, the problem was larger than all weather mats.
It appeared to be an issue with millions of Toyota
and Lexus vehicles. Floor mats on the driver side could
similarly snag and trap the accelerator pedal, so the company
issued a wide recall, but at least for a subset
of vehicles. This solution of removing the floor mat didn't
(20:57):
fully address the problem, so in early twenty ten, Toyota
issued another recall, this time for faulty accelerator pedals themselves.
The shape of the pedal appeared to be the problem.
The pedal could catch on the floorboard and it could
stay down. Most but not all, of the recalled vehicles
were also under the recall for the driver matt issue,
(21:21):
so Toyota and the NHTSA had a bit of a
spat about this. The car company initially insisted that the
floor mats were the beginning and end of the problem,
and the NHTSA kept saying the problem hasn't been fixed yet. Now.
There were other issues as well that Toyota had to
address with its various vehicles, but the floor mat slash
(21:42):
faulty accelerator pedal. Those flaws cropped up and stayed an
issue into early twenty eleven, and they necessitated several recalls
of various Toyota vehicles. The company and its dealerships incurred
billions of dollars in costs as result of these recalls. Moreover,
the company's image took a big hit, and in the end,
(22:05):
while the problem had the potential to cause accidents, very
few incidents were ever reported. To learn more about the
media hype that surrounded the problem, I recommend reading Robert E.
Cole's twenty eleven pieces in The Atlantic. It as the
title who was really at fault? For the Toyota recalls?
Because it's a complicated story, Like, there was definitely an
(22:28):
issue there, and a potentially very dangerous issue, but there
were a lot of players in the space that complicated
things beyond how they already were. So Toyota has also
been affected by another recall, one that affected eighteen other
auto makers and more than thirty brands of cars. So
(22:48):
I'm talking about air bags made by a part supplier
called Takata. A fault was found in Takata air bags
that could lead to accidental and explosive deployment, and this
could also include the air bags rupturing and the explosion
propelling dangerous or even deadly shrapnel into a vehicle. Multiple
people died as a result of this over the course
(23:11):
of several different years. So the issue originated with the
inflator for the air bags, the actual device responsible for
pushing gas into the air bag at an incredible speed.
So the inflators used a propellant of ammonium nitrate, and
the propellant that Takata was using in these early steel
inflators did not have a chemical drying agent, a desiccant
(23:35):
in other words, and that meant that in humid environments,
moisture could affect the propellant and high temperatures could make
this very very reactive. So here in the United States,
the NHTSA identified a few regions as being more conducive
to the environmental factors that have an impact and make
(23:56):
these things more dangerous. It's dangerous no matter where you are,
but there's certain areas where because of the climate, it's
more likely to happen. So that includes the southeastern United States,
including my home state of Georgia, as well as the
state of Hawaii and a few other places. So they
kind of divided up the United States into three zones,
(24:16):
with each zone having a certain level of risk, and
the zone my states and is in the highest risk. Now,
the problem has been around since the late nineteen nineties.
There were models from like model year ninety eight or
ninety nine that were included in the various recalls eventually,
and there were vehicles as recent as the model year
(24:37):
twenty sixteen that were part of this. Around sixty seven
million airbags are affected by this recall or the series
of recalls here in the United States. Global figures are
closer to one hundred million. The NHTSA says at least
twenty seven people have died from these exploding airbags, more
(25:00):
than four hundred had been injured due to them, and
Takata in twenty fifteen said it was aware of eighty
four ruptures occurring since two thousand and two, So it
very much is a thing. Are the odds high that
it could happen to you if you happen to be
driving one of these vehicles? Not necessarily, I mean, it
depends upon where you live and the conditions of the
(25:21):
environment as to whether or not you know your vehicle
might be vulnerable. But it's a really good reason to
check to see if your vehicle has been affected by
this recall because you can actually take your vehicle to
a dealership to have the air bags replaced for free.
That is part of the deal that Takata agreed to
in order to fix this massive problem. Now of great
(25:44):
concern is the timeline of not only when the airbags
were incorporated into vehicles, but when Takata engineers first became
aware that there was a problem in the first place. So,
according to a twenty fourteen article in The New York Times,
Takata workers first began to test their air bags for
possible deficiencies way back in two thousand and four, because
(26:08):
that was when an airbag had apparently deployed spontaneously and
propelled debris at a driver in Alabama. Apparently, the workers
found that the inflators they were using were not as
resilient as they thought they were. But the company would
actually wait four years before filing a report about faulty
(26:30):
air bag systems with regulators, So between two thousand and
four and two thousand and eight, according to The New
York Times, Takata knew about this but kept quiet about
the issue, putting potentially hundreds of thousands of people, maybe
even millions, at risk. Now, Takata's two thousand and eight
filing prompted a recall in two thousand and eight, one
(26:51):
that covered several car makes and models, across multiple automakers.
This is what I was talking about earlier, Like, automakers
don't make everything that goes into their vehicles, So if
a manufacturer that creates a critical component does a bad
job of it, it can affect cars across numerous car manufacturers,
(27:12):
not just one. The list of cars affected actually grew
year by year, Like it was one of those things
where the story got worse the longer it went, where
Takata would say, Oh, it turns out these types of
airbags or airbags that are similar enough where they can
have the same problem can also be found in these
other vehicles on top of all the ones we've already
(27:32):
listed that kept happening year after year. Again, the NHTSA
really was focusing on regions that were more likely to
have hot and humid weather. Because there's only so much
you could do so quickly, right, Like, this is a
critical piece in a car's safety systems and it needs
to be addressed, but you can only make air bags
(27:54):
so quickly. You can only make the replacements at a
certain speed, And so there was a bottle there. You
couldn't get the airbags to dealerships fast enough to be
able to meet the needs of all the people who
had cars that had these air bags in them. In
November twenty fourteen, the NHTSA called for a national recall,
(28:14):
and by spring twenty fifteen, the number of vehicles affected
by the recall had reached thirty three point eight million
in the United States. That summer, Reuters reported that some
of the replaced airbags still had faulty inflators in them
and that they would need to be replaced again. And
by some I mean like four hundred thousand or so.
While all this was going on, there were still incidents
(28:34):
involving air bags deploying prematurely, sometimes leading to deaths. This
was a terrible situation. You had this great sense of
urgency to have these faulty air bags replaced. You had
this bottleneck in airbag production and delivery. The supply chain
just couldn't keep up with the need to replace all
of these Because this was, you know, affecting cars across
(28:55):
multiple years of manufacturing. It wasn't like it was one
fleet of cars, it was several. An effort was made
to prioritize the specific regions of vehicles that were most
found to be vulnerable, but it still was a real challenge,
and there was a challenge in communicating all of this
to the public. The NHTSA has gone so far as
(29:17):
to issue a do not drive advisory for certain vehicles,
stating that owners should prioritize having their cars repaired, which
dealerships should perform for free. Takata would face hefty fines
in lawsuits and eventually had to file for bankruptcy in
twenty seventeen, which is not a big surprise because the
last estimates I saw for the total cost of the
recall is somewhere in the neighborhood of like twenty four
(29:39):
billion dollars. In twenty eighteen, Takata submitted a plan that
included a trust fund established for people who had been
directly affected by airbag explosions. Because these were still an
issue and the number of vehicles recalled continued to grow
and it's very much ongoing. There are still vehicles on
the road right now that have these old Takata air
(30:00):
bags installed. The NHTSA recommends the driver's check to make
sure their older vehicles aren't on the list of models
affected by this issue, and if they are, that you
then take the vehicle in to get that free airbag replacement.
Considering this summer here in the United States has already
seen record temperatures, my feeling is that even people who
live in states that aren't traditionally associated with high heat
(30:20):
and humidity should probably double check to make sure their
vehicle is in the clear. Here in the US. You
can go and do that by visiting the website in
HTSA dot gov. Submitting the state and license plate number
of your vehicle or your vehicle's ven will tell you
if there are any unrepaired recalls associated with your specific vehicle.
(30:41):
It's a quick way to check that could save you
from injury or worse. So I highly recommend doing it,
Like just check and see if you're fortunate there won't
be anything there, and then it'll tell you there are
zero unresolved repairs anything like that, and that's awesome. It's
great peace of mind. According to numerous sources, there's still
are millions of affected vehicles on the road today. Okay,
(31:04):
we're going to take another quick break and then we'll
come back to finish up this discussion about tech recalls.
We're back. So not all tech recalls necessitate a return
(31:25):
to a manufacturer or a dealership or something like that.
Some can be addressed through software updates that are pushed
out over the air. That was the case with the
Google Nest smoke detector. In early January twenty fourteen, Google
completed an acquisition of the Nest company, best known for
(31:45):
their thermostats, and a few months later, Nest engineers realized
that the Nest Protect Smoke plus carbon monoxide alarm had
a feature that could lead to dangerous situations, and that
feature was called Nest Wave. As the name implies, this
was a gesture control system, so the idea was that
you could wave at an alarm in order to shut
(32:07):
it off. So imagine you're in your kitchen. You're toasting
some bread, but you forgot that the day before you
toasted a bagel, so you had the toaster set higher
than you normally would, and your bread starts to burn,
and the smoke detector goes off, and you eject your toast,
and then you're waving frantically at the smoke alarm to
stop it from making that terrible noise, which seems like
(32:29):
a pretty cool feature and definitely easier than like getting
a step ladder out so you can reach the reset button.
At the center of an alarm, or do what I do,
which is where you grab a nearby broom and use
the handle to kind of poke that button. But there's
a problem with this gesture system, and that is that
the nest Wave had the potential to pick up on
gestures that were not intended to be a command to
(32:51):
shut the alarm off, and the device might not sound
at all if it happens to be in the presence
of somebody who is waving their hands around while there's
some smoke. I'm reminded of a friend of mine who
is extremely expressive and she talks with her hands. If
she was on the phone, one hand would be holding
the phone to her ear, the other hand would be
(33:13):
gesturing wildly. Well, if in the background something had caught
fire and the smoke detector had picked up on it,
it might see her gesturing and think, oh, she's got
this handled because she's waving me to shut up. That's
not great. So Google promptly issued a recall affecting more
than four hundred thousand smoke alarms, and the company issued
a software update to disable the nest Wave functionality. There
(33:35):
you got your problem solved. Now you can no longer
turn off the alarm just by waving at it. So
this recall was a necessary regulatory step, but it did
not mean that customers actually had to send their alarms
into Google for replacement. They just needed to make sure
their alarm was connected to the internet in order to
receive the software update. Nest said it received no reports
(33:57):
of the issues leading to injury or property damage, which
is good. There are lots of other tech recall stories
that essentially end with software updates. Quite a few with
Tesla have gone that way. All of the ones we're
going to talk about with the cyber truck are more
about bringing the truck in to have something physically addressed.
(34:17):
Well again, we'll get to that before the end. So
we've got one other one I want to chat about
before we get to cyber trucks, and that is a
thing that was a little tech gadget. It was a
giveaway in happy Meals at McDonald's in twenty sixteen, and
it became a big pr headache. So in twenty sixteen,
McDonald's introduced a couple of fitness tracker type things. They
(34:39):
were called the steppe It Activity wristbands. These were not
sophisticated by any means. But you wouldn't expect them to
be sophisticated either, right, because it's a giveaway. It's a
kid's toy in a happy meal. It's not going to
be some sort of expensive gadget. They were essentially pedometers,
and they were not particularly good from what I understand.
I read a review of one, I think it was wired,
(35:01):
and it said it was strangely very sensitive to non
steps and not so sensitive to actual steps. But they
looked like toy smart watches, right, They kind of looked like,
you know, a very cartoonish smart watch, but that's kind
of what they look like. The promotion with the toy
fitness trackers began on August ninth of twenty sixteen, but
(35:22):
before very long, some parents were reporting that their kids
were getting rashes or blisters or even burns after wearing
the tracker for just a short while. In fact, according
to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, our old friends over there,
there were more than seventy reports of such cases. Now,
(35:43):
obviously that's a very bad look, and McDonald's quickly issued
a recall for all thirty three million of these things
they had purchased them from China and apparently there were
some real issues. Whether it was chemicals on the thing
that were causing it or some other issue. I can't say.
I'm guessing it's a chemical thing, like probably similar to
(36:04):
I have a nickel allergy, so if I wear something
that's got nickel on it against my skin, I get blisters.
So by August seventeenth, the wristbands were gone from Happy Meals.
They'd only been there for a little less than two weeks.
So the incident prompted discussions as to whether the decision
to include the toy trackers in the first place was
(36:24):
even a good idea. Not that McDonald should have known
that these would potentially cause harm. That wasn't really the question.
It was more like, was this really just a cynical
attempt to make McDonald's appear to be more health conscious
because there were already criticisms leveled against the company regarding
the nutritional quality or lack thereof, of the food that
(36:46):
it was serving to people, and some critics said McDonald's
didn't really attempt to create a serious message around health
and wellness. They just included this as a toy because
they figured some kids would have seen their parents wearing
something similar and now they got to do it too.
Parents were encouraged to bring the wristbands back to McDonald's,
whereupon the company would replace the wristband with a different
(37:07):
happy meal toy, as well as a choice of either
yogurt or apple slices to compensate the children whose wrists
were potentially put in danger. I'm not sure how many
parents felt like saying I'm loving it by the end
of that day. And now we will finish by talking
about the Tesla cybertruck recalls. So the first recall was
(37:27):
a relatively small one. It happened in April twenty twenty four.
It did affect fewer than four thousand trucks. I mean,
four thousands a big number. But when we're talking about
the other recalls here, when we're chatting about the millions,
four thousand's not that bad. So what was the problem. Well,
the issue was a faulty accelerator pedal cover which could
fall off. And if the cover fell off, it created
(37:50):
the possibility of the accelerator pedal sticking against the interior
trim of the cyber truck. And so we get back
to an unintended acceleration problem similar to what happened in
the Toyota vehicles that I mentioned earlier. So Tesla issued
the recall, but it also said that the company didn't
have any record of any incidents happening due to this issue,
(38:13):
which is good, you know, considering the potential severity of
the problem. But you know, it's it's great that this
was solved before you know, any catastrophe could happen. However,
that was just the first of the Tesla cyber truck recalls.
There were two more since then, and again that just
that one happened in April of twenty twenty four. So
in June twenty twenty four, two Tesla recalls popped up
(38:36):
on the NHTSA website. So one was due to an
issue with exterior trim detaching from the side of the car,
which is an issue that affected like eleven three hundred
eighty three cyber trucks that were produced between November thirteenth,
twenty twenty three and May of twenty twenty four. The
second recall was for eleven thousand, six hundred eighty eight
(38:58):
vehicles and the problem was potentially a much more dangerous
one windshield wiper motor that could fail and just leave
the driver unable to clear their windshield in a rainstorm,
or what have you. The company said the issue was
quote a wiper motor whose gate driver may have been
damaged due to electrical overstress during functional testing end quote.
(39:19):
So I guess the message is we safety tested this
thing so hard that we made it unsafe that we
wore it out. That's kind of how I read that.
That might be an unfair reading. That's my own opinion,
So I just want to put that out there. But
according to posts on web forums, some cyber truck owners
had been waiting for a replacement wiper motor for weeks.
(39:40):
That's both frustrating and dangerous, depending upon what driving conditions
happened to be, right, Like, if it's boring down rain,
it's not really safe to drive your cyber truck if
the wiper motor isn't working. All that being said, I
think it's unfair to pick on any one automaker too
much when it comes to these recalls, because, like I said,
there's so many different components go into a finished vehicle,
(40:02):
and different suppliers are for lots of these different pieces, right,
and to expect everything to go perfectly all the time
from every supplier that's unrealistic. The key I think is
that companies need to be quick to acknowledge when there's
a problem and to have a solution ready to go.
It's important for all parties involved. It's definitely important for
(40:25):
customers who depend upon the reliability and safety of the
products that they're purchasing, but it's also important for the
companies if they want to avoid stuff like massive fines
and hefty class action lawsuits and like pr that's just
really bad for the company that tends to be also
bad for the stock price. So there's just a handful
of recalls and tech products and what caused them to happen. Ideally,
(40:51):
of course, a tech product is put through thorough testing
and all the major stuff gets worked out and if
if there's anything left over, it's minor and not hazardous.
But that's not how the real world works, right Either
there are urgent deadlines to meet and people start cutting
some corners, or you're depending upon products that were made
(41:13):
by someone else that you thought were reliable turns out
they're not. There are a lot of things that can
go into that, and so I don't want to put
too much blame. I know I am very hard on
Tesla in general, but I don't feel like that I
can make a case that Tesla did a bad job
with this. I think it's just unfortunate. I think the
cyber truck in general is unfortunate, but that's mostly due
(41:35):
to the fact that I still think it's really an
ugly vehicle. But that's my own personal opinion. Again, I
don't think it's necessarily bad. You would have to ask
someone who reviews cars for a living what they thought
of it and get that sort of data from them.
I am not the right person to ask. But yes,
that's a selection of recalls. I am going to sign
(41:59):
off for this episode. I am currently probably on my
way back to Atlanta as you listen to this because
I took a long weekend to celebrate my belated birthday.
I hope all of you had a great weekend, and
I will talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff
(42:22):
is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
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TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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