In light of recent sug­ges­tions of tech­ni­cal faults and the ensu­ing recall of a num­ber of mod­els from Toyota’s line, Robert Wright looks at why we should not worry about dri­ving mod­ern cars.

The rea­sons: the increased risks are neg­li­gi­ble, the sys­tems that fail undoubt­edly save more lives than not, this is the nature of car ‘testing’.

Our cars are, increas­ingly, software-driven — that is, they’re doing more and more of the driving.

And soft­ware, as the peo­ple at Microsoft or Apple can tell you, is full of sur­prises. It’s pretty much impos­si­ble to antic­i­pate all the bugs in a com­plex com­puter pro­gram. Hence the reliance on beta testing. […]

Now, “beta test­ing” sounds creepy when the process by which testers uncover bugs can involve death. But there are two rea­sons not to start bemoan­ing the brave new world we’re entering.

First, even back before cars were software-driven, beta test­ing was com­mon. Any car is a sys­tem too com­plex for design­ers to fully antic­i­pate the upshot for life and limb. Hence decades of non-microchip-related safety recalls.

Sec­ond, the fact that a fea­ture of a car can be fatal isn’t nec­es­sar­ily a per­sua­sive objec­tion to it. […]

Sim­i­larly, those soft­ware fea­tures that are sure to have unan­tic­i­pated bugs, includ­ing fatal ones, have upsides. Elec­tronic sta­bil­ity con­trol keeps cars from flip­ping over, and elec­tronic throt­tle con­trol improves mileage.