Ask HN: Risk of unsafe software in automobiles?

> And I really prefer absence of modern safety like ABS if the safety is controlled by software manufacturer only.

I'm really wondering where this mindset ends though. You're foregoing safety equipment which is proven to make you far safer on the roads because you can't access the firmware of the device. You're choosing a much older car with far worse safety designs because of this. How far would you take this idea? If you were seriously injured and in the hospital, would you refuse for the doctors to use machines which contain non-free software to save your life? Would you rather die than interface with non-free software?

Don't get me wrong, I'm a generally FOSS supporting person and agree with many of RMS' ideas surrounding software freedom. If there were two cars out there which were roughly the same, one with free software and one with closed, I'd pick the free software version. But in the end I value my family's safety far more than my opinion on free software, so it is an obvious choice to choose the safer car.

Language ambiguities are leading to confusion, my bad. I get it. With this sentence:

> You're foregoing safety equipment which is proven to make you far safer on the roads because you can't access the firmware of the device

The "because you can't access" is relating back to the "you're foregoing safety equipment" part of the sentence. You're choosing to not use proven safety equipment because you can't access the firmware of the ABS controller. I do agree it is not the fact that the ABS system is closed that makes it safer; it could easily be an open-source/FLOSS firmware and still provide similar safety features.

> I do not want to learn any proprietary framework.

I don't need to learn about the intricate details of how ABS systems work in order to benefit from having one. The doctors using those machines aren't necessarily knowing about how the ECG monitor actually takes the samples from the leads and renders the lines on the screen, but they benefit from having one of those tools. Do you also not use plain metal tools unless you completely understand their mixture and how the metal is made and fully comprehend how they're forged/machined/etc? Or do you sometimes just accept "yes, this is a screwdriver, it can drive screws."

I don't know everything about how the local metro train system works and probably wouldn't be able to know everything about it, but I'll still ride on the train. I learn to use the resources available to me, even if some parts are opaque to me.