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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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. 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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. 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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. 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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. 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.