Safercar.gov Overwhelmed By Recall For Deadly Airbags

darylb writes "The NHTSA's safercar.gov website appears to be suffering under the load of recent vehicle recalls, including the latest recall of some 4.7 million vehicles using airbags made by Takata. Searching recalls by VIN is non-responsive at present. Searching by year, make, and model hangs after selecting the year. What can sites serving an important public function do to ensure they stay running during periods of unexpected load?" More on the airbag recall from The New York Times and the Detroit Free Press.

Comments

We need to do it lke Europe.

[gurps_npc]

Specifically, they need to make the car company responsible for every single repair of every single recalled vehicle.

As in, if they sold a faulty product, they have to fix it, whether it is a a set of brakes that don't work, or a window that won't open.

Basically, we end the 'buyer beware' system for new cars.

Re:We need to do it lke Europe.

[enjar]

I've received a few recall notices over the years for the cars I own. I followed the instructions on the form, made an appointment with the dealer, dropped the car off, then they did their thing. I never had to pay a dime.

You might be confusing a recall with a technical service bulletin. They are not the same, although a TSB can turn into a recall in certain cases -- and that happened in one case, for which I was refunded the money I'd paid for the service. All the recall notices I've received have had language on them to this effect, that if you repaired the car on your own dime (and can product a receipt) that they will reimburse you.

And if you buy a used car, it's probably worth the time to check for recalls. It's a similar situation for any consumer product you might pick up off Craigslist or from a private sale. We have a couple of kids and children's products are also notorious for this, since there's quite a "hand me down" / "cash sale" market that exists when your kids outgrow something and you don't need it any more.

Be competent?

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

How about building your tech stack so that it can be scaled up/down on-demand? I'm using Rackspace and we have dedicated servers along with cloud servers. I can add or remove cloud servers as needed and also have the load balancers updated.

If you're just doing reads against a database, it's straightforward to add additional replicas (we use MongoDB with replica sets, don't have enough data for sharding yet). If you need to do any processing, then you should build a grid compute system where you can just add additional compute nodes. We're using RabbitMQ along with Celery. Granted, this strategy ignores issues like a saturated network, but our provider is responsible for dealing with that.

Well

[Richy_T]

What can sites serving an important public function do to ensure they stay running during periods of unexpected load?"

Not be created and run by government which has very little interest in ensuring the success of legislation which has already passed. There's the next election to think about, don't you know and those pesky Republians/Democrats [delete as applicable] are going to destroy the world if you don't vote in our slightly less scummy candidate.