So no, the word recall is used because is the official terminology used for these issues regardless of the solution required to fix them.
The word does have its origin in a world where solutions were rarely software updates. That they are software issues make them no less serious though. I suspect that in some cases the software issues might indeed be far more dangerous than errors which mandate physical recalls.
"We use a silly word for OTA software updates: 'recalls'"
"Recalls is the word we use"
"Yes..."
If that doesn't happen there are legal consequences.
The fact that software is involved changes exactly nothing. And honestly - the entire industry needs to get over the bizarre belief that software has a magical right to be less performant, less competent, less reliable, less robust, and more consumer hostile than hardware, just because it can be updated.
Tesla is treating its product-launches like it's just some browser-game in the cloud, instead of treating it as what it is: The handover of a 6000 pound bullet into the hand of a customer who will fire it into a crowd in expectation to not hit anyone...
(The etymology of a word can be quite different from its current meaning today.)
It does not, no more than gaslighting implies lighting a gas lamp or the phrase crossing the Rubicon implies actually crossing a river in Italy, in any case. It hasn't meant anything of that sort since the mid-sixties.
Recall is what legislation requires you to call it if something is unsafe for public use and it has to be withdrawn for the market until it's remedied. It doesn't matter how that's done. The NHTSA guidelines don't include physically getting the product to a manufacturer or a distributor as a requirement to issue, or as a criteria for fulfillment, of a recall. (I don't think recall guidelines in any industry do, it's just the NHTSA's that apply in this case).
Yes, this also applies for firmware upgrades. No, it doesn't matter where they're performed. The FDA has issued firmware-related recalls for devices with programmable logic since programmable logic in medical devices was a thing so like... fourty years. If anyone in some company's safety staff just learned about that's let's all please give them a warm welcome to the 20th century.
The main reason why recalls typically involve returning the product to the manufacturer (or, more often, as the vast majority of recalls are for food, medicine or cosmetics, to the distributor) is traceability. Manufacturers need to maintain documentation that shows they took reasonable action to notify all customers, that depending on how they chose to handle it they made repairs for free, replaced them for free, or that the refund they issued made reasonable allowances for depreciation, and so on. Some foodstuffs or medicine also have disposal safety rules that require you to maintain adequate documentation as well. It's just the easiest way to deal with it, both in terms of remedying the actual issue, and in terms of legal risk.
But it's got nothing to do with returning something to the factory, it hasn't meant anything of that sort in like half a century.
....And yes, this IS leading to this place becoming more and more Reddit like (no, that isn't a tired cliché, no matter what the FAQs claim).
Downvoting needs to be reserved for comments that detract from the conversation. At this rate, we will need some form of meta moderation to ensure this happens.
I understand where you're coming from but truth is a post like that one does detract from the usual excusemaking conversation that some companies enjoy here, so I'm not surprised it was downvoted :-). It's one of the many ways in which karma points killed online discourse. I just happen to be old enough to have racked up a lot of pre-karma posting (including, of course, flamewars, what would life be without spice?) so downvotes don't really register on my radar.
Not all recalls are for big mechanical problems. I've received several recall notices for issues that just required the dealership to flash the ECU or some other controller with new firmware. Whether that update is flashed OTA or with a special dongle at the dealership doesn't really make a difference if you're looking at it from the perspective of vehicle safety/reliability/stability. The point is that a recall is a significant enough issue that the manufacturer _must_ notify their customers about it.
I agree that if you count _every_ OTA update as a recall, you can't really do an apples-to-apples comparison. The cost of pushing an OTA update is much lower than the cost of a recall, so Tesla probably pushes a bunch of minor OTA updates that other manufacturers wouldn't bother with. But it's a fair comparison if only some subset of OTA updates are counted as recalls (i.e. updates addressing a safety issue).
Also, in the head of most people, I think, a recall is something where the car needs to be returned physically. But still, obviously, the issues can be as serious as physical issues. It’s just that we’re used to physical recalls.
That it's used for OTA updates just (to me) means they should use some more suitable wording for it. And yeah, as other people have pointed out it's the word used for the legislation. I still think they should use some kind of different wording though.
This conversation happens every single time Tesla produces a product that is legally unsafe. We keep having this conversation because Tesla keeps making an unsafe product.
Maybe because an over-the-air update is hard to seriously consider a "recall"?