Toyota's claim of gas pedal defect called a "red herring" | Hacker News Reader

Toyota's claim of gas pedal defect called a "red herring"

latimes.com

18 pointsilamont21 comments

I don't want to imply a lot but it's important to note that Toyota's bad press is coming overwhelmingly form the US. Of course this is not 100% relevant since the US is a bad market but Toyota in particular and Japan in general have quite a history of taking safety serious. It's unlikely for them to ignore a matter of safety over economic concerns.

In case we are dealing with a cover up we would at least see some resignations at a top level. Japanese take their job very serious and probably some would commit suicide if it would be proven that they didn't do their job properly and people got injured because of this.

Could it be that we are dealing with economic protectionism though propaganda?

I think it's mostly the American tendency to inflate controversy, and it's particularly juicy given that Toyota is the biggest car company and the Camry is now basically the All-American Car. Of course, it seems to me that all the controversy is warranted: I subscribe to the theory that the problem is with the software that controls the engine and transmission.

This is because of my own experience with a Camry that shifts at the wrong times and has unpredictable acceleration or lack of acceleration. Several months after we bought the car (a 2007) we were able to get a firmware upgrade that improved the performance somewhat, but at the cost of gas mileage. Since the car doesn't perform as well as it should (it's nowhere near as responsive or efficient as our '97 Camry was), it seems like the underlying problems still haven't been fixed.

Toyota has offered two other "solutions" for their problems, but neither rings true, and as the LA Times points out, neither can explain all the reported incidents. If Toyota were covering up their inability to find and fix the real problem, this is what it would look like. Here in the US, we've seen a lack of honesty from Toyota that seems very typical of American corporations.

I had similar thoughts when I saw this. It made me think of that old Audi case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_Minutes#Unintended_accelerat...

Too early to say, but I would agree that having the US Government as the majority stockholder of Toyota's largest competitor, GM, could subtly influence disclosures from government agencies and media coverage.

So it sounds to me quite like an electronic control problem. It seems like there are several cases where the engine control logic prevents the throttle from being closed--for example, during startup there is a faster idle. Similarly, during shift of an automatic transmission, there is some throttle control going on.

Thus, it doesn't seem too far-fetched to imagine that there is a glitch in the engine control logic that is pulling the throttle and hence the gas pedal in a way that makes it seem like there is a problem with the pedal itself.

My question about this is: Why is Toyota so anxious to avoid identifying electronic control issues as the culprit, as opposed to sticking pedals and floor mats? Is it because they can't blame a supplier, or it's more complex/costly to fix? Or something else?

The worst answer might be that it hasn't been identified--they can't find or reproduce the problem.

I think that this is the most likely answer. They probably figure they can gain some time during the recall and fix the actual problem. Question is what will happen to the pedal manufacturer whose name has been dragged through the mud?

And another supporting opinion has been put forward: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10445564-64.html

Owning an `09 Camry SE, I can tell you, the problem is larger than reported.

Shifting at odd times, hard shifting, etc.

I'm not sure what your definition of "odd times" is, but automatic transmissions' decisions of when to shift constantly annoy me. (Most of my automatic experience is in a Honda CRV. Never driven a Toyota.)

That may just be a fault in the transmission. Although it's new enough that it shouldn't be a wear issue, it could be gum in the valve body (do they still have those?) or a fluid problem.

The article talks about the suspicion in certain quarters that it's an electronic glitch.

Which is a lot more what it sounds like to me, though there appear to be legitimate literal-sticking claims too. "Sudden acceleration" != pedal not letting off.

It's one of the reasons I'm really not comfortable with a full-blown drive-by-wire car. My car's windshield wipers sometimes lose their wiping pattern, and skip a beat or delay by a second or so. If something THAT simple can't be made foolproof, why would I trust my brake pedal to always work when each tire is controlled independently to make me stop faster? Give me a hybrid system any day, though.

I agree with others that this problem skinks of an electrical/software issue.

Drive-by-wire can be made safe. All fighter jets made since the 70s have been fly-by-wire. Their airfoils are inherently unstable (unstable airframes are more maneuverable) and computers keep the plane from flopping out of the sky. The yolk is a glorified joystick talking to a computer which controls the flight control surfaces. Some aircraft even have programs for recovering from various emergencies (stall, flat-spin, etc).

I believe most comercial aircraft are fly-by-wire too, and I know all the Airbus planes are.

Doing fly-by-wire safely is done with a lot of very expensive QA, correctness proofs and redundancy. If I remember right, all or most planes with fly-by-wire have 3 computers that all vote on how to move the control surfaces. Those 3 computers' software is created in 3 completely separate groups in hopes that 2 groups won't have the same bug. The voting system means a software single glitch or hardware failure doesn't result in a crash.

I really doubt Toyota (or any other car manufacturer) is putting that much effort into their embedded computers. Hopefully this recall forces manufacturers to think more critically of these systems.

Drive-by-wire can be made safe

I absolutely agree, but I'd still like a kill-button on my car (ie, ignition switch), and brakes should have a physical backup in worst-case-scenario. And, frankly, I don't trust any one company to do it right; it's the sort of thing that's ideal to make really public, so others can spot problems before they happen.

The ejection seat in those fighter jets aren't exclusively by-wire, last I checked, though they're probably enhanced somehow (not implying I'm an expert on fighter ejection seats, though). Your ultimate-backup should ALWAYS be an independent, simple, physical system that effectively cannot go wrong.

> Drive-by-wire can be made safe.

Sure, if you're willing to spend 70 million dollars on a car.

Snarky one-liners aside, this hits on one of my pet peeves: software quality. I mean, there's no reason why my IDE should die every time it tries to open a .sql file bigger than about 500K, but it does; there's no reason why MacOS X shouldn't have a "refresh" command in its Finder views, but it doesn't; there's no reason why I have to bang my head against software issues every single day, but I do.

So, while the optimistic technologist in me would like to see what cars could do with more advanced computer-controlled systems, the experienced and pragmatic technician in me is really not looking forward to it.

there's no reason why MacOS X shouldn't have a "refresh" command in its Finder views

What would you use it for? It already updates in less than a second. If you're looking for extremely up-to-date info, you're probably not a "Finder-only" user, and know how to use the terminal, so use that.

OSX is tiered, it doesn't give you all options at the simplest level, which is a HUGE reason for its success. Correctly so, IMO. No option overload, it "just works". Want more control? The terminal is right there. Learn how to use it and you'll pick up better practices than mashing the refresh button. (not implying you are, just making a general statement)

The Finder frequently loses sync over Samba networks; the "updates in less than a second" doesn't work perfectly (or even really all that well in a lot of cases).

The only fix for such a situation is to restart the Finder.

I don't see how Command-R wouldn't be a better solution.

Incidentally, I'm far from the only technician dealing with mixed environments on a daily basis that's had this complaint.

Samba networks do that for me on Windows too, despite the ability to refresh the window. More often, it'll crash Explorer rather than actually update the info if something is already clogging the tubes. Plus, network shares almost never update that quickly, and expecting them to do so is rather ridiculous. Round-trip time to a server clearly wasn't implied as part of the Finder update speed.

And again, I'll point out that the terminal is right there. If it's Finder that's slow, the terminal will still work. If the terminal doesn't keep up-to-date, then it's a problem with their implementation of Samba, not Finder, and a refresh button would do nothing (except maybe nail your network with unnecessary requests by most people mashing it when something doesn't work).

Well, I guess we can continue to dicker about the relative merits of a "Refresh" command in the MacOS X Finder, except:

1) It's not just Samba networks, it's other things too, up to and including 10.5 [1].

2) People have gone to the trouble to write Applescripts to do the job for them. [2]

3) "Just use Terminal" does not justify a broken auto-update system, which...

4) ...is all fine and dandy when it works, but really needs some kind of sensible fall-back system when it doesn't, which...

5) ...brings us to the original point, which was that continuing to integrate software of this quality into automobiles, without manual override systems, is just plain stupid.

So, would you like to continue to beat this dead horse?

[1]: http://robsheldon.com/brokenopsys -- in which the problem frustrates me enough to actually complain about it.

[2]: http://www.tuaw.com/2007/04/16/refresh-the-finder/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com