Automakers get kind of trapped in iterative design on established product lines. Any changes to a car line already selling in the hundreds of thousands obviously has to go through extensive reviews with suppliers, marketers, dealers, etc. Any big change requires Herculean effort (the recent change to all-aluminum body in the F150 is a good example.). But new products, often built on a new key technology, often quickly become engineering playgrounds. The first Prius was like this... Even though the new thing then was hybrid drivetrain, Toyota poured a whole lot of other unrelated ideas into that car, many of which succeeded and migrated to other Toyota product lines.

Agreed. Tesla's key technology is and has always been that electric drivetrain. It took years of work and many iterations to develop that. Everything around that drivetrain in the Model S is elegantly designed but still within reach of what other car companies can do. Batteries are certainly not a key technology for Tesla, as their stated goal for the Gigafactory is to build common batteries cheaper, not necessarily better.

Reminds me of a TV ad. "This is your brain (USB up to 2.0). This is drugs (high speed transceivers). This is your brain on drugs (yeah, bad stuff happens here). Any questions?"

The number one reason to be wary of USB is that half of the hubs and adapters out there barely work right. I can still go to Fry's and find cheap crap that will go wonky even interfacing with just USB 2.0 devices. USB 3.0 is the Wild, Wild West in terms of quality, and they are already jumping the gun to 10 Gbps? I am very afraid. Put it this way: To achieve USB certification, all you have to do is pass a ten minute functional test. Intel's stuff may cost a lot more and may never get great market penetration, but their stuff is almost always rock solid. You get what you pay for.

Parents should still lock up their guns, with or without smart triggers. What is the harm in having one more redundant layer to keep kids from firing those guns though? Even a "good" parent that dutifully locks up their guns immediately after use might have a lapse or two.

The government should be especially concerned with protecting children from stupid parents. If not, then why do we have CPS? This is not endorsing mandatory smart triggers, just saying if availability of effective smart triggers leads to fewer child injuries and deaths, then the government should help make that a reality.

I dunno about "mandatory" smart triggers, but a little less reliability seems like a very worthy tradeoff for the feature of making kids or other unintended parties unable to fire the weapon.

A lot of naysayers of smart triggers are using the supposed inevitability of remote kill switches as part of their arguments. Which I find a little absurd, a little too much conspiracy theorizing. (For example, I don't ever recall any Democratic leader asking for such a thing.) If this is a real concern, then I would like something more to substantiate it. That was the only point of my original post.

Really? That's pretty sad if true. Do you have a citation?

Thanks for the link, but there is no indication of mandatory remote kill switch.

Why can't we have both? Safes and smart triggers? They are not mutually exclusive.

They are only mandating smart features, not kill switches, according to the article.

You misunderstand the market for smart guns. They appeal most to inexperienced and/or untrained people worried about self defense, as well as people with kids, worried what might happen if those kids start messing around with stuff they shouldn't. (I'm not necessarily endorsing their parenting skills here.)

I suppose the government financially benefits if a sick or old person dies. When a young healthy person dies, that's a lot of lost income tax revenue. And if a government is not vested in protecting children, it's a pretty lousy government.

No machine is 100% reliable.