How Real are the Defects in Toyota's Cars? | Hacker News Reader

How Real are the Defects in Toyota's Cars?

theatlantic.com

50 pointsbfung43 comments

I want to sound like a conspiracy theorist. It seems like the Toyota defects are not defects but isolated incidents, which the US congress has exploited to get back to a Japanese corporation that created devastation for the entire US auto industry.

Steve Woz was pretty vocal about the Prius thing, I remember seeing a post of his on Slashdot about how the acceleration thing was definitely a repeatable bug somehow related to cruise control.

Fake edit: Found it, he details it first in a post here http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1430048&cid=299... And then it gets its own discussion here http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/02/02/1458230/Woz-Cites-Sc...

I have no reason to doubt Woz, but what's the point of yet another claim with no evidence to back it up?

Woz claims it's repeatable. So why not buy a cheap camcorder, get a friend to be the passenger/cameraman, go record an instance of it actually happening and put it on YouTube? It would be on every news channel in the country the next day and Toyota would be forced to respond directly.

In fact, if I had the kind of money Woz did and thought there was a real danger here, I'd just buy a camera that installed in the headliner and recorded everything that was happening while the car was on at all times, so that I could easily catch the bug when it occurred.

An alternative theory is that Toyota, in its hubris-driven quest to surpass GM for automotive production, broke a lot of its own rules regarding quality control and long-term relationships when it comes to part sourcing. A lot of this seems to be driven by the fact that the car maker that has a problem is Toyota; not because they are a Japanese car company, but because they are a car company who have spent decades building a (justified) reputation for high-quality automobiles with a very low defect rate and over the past few months all of that work disappeared in a puff of smoke.

I've worked in the auto parts industry - while it's true that Toyota is ruthless in that market, so is everyone else. In fact, during my short time there we all hated GM with a raging passion - they constantly demanded more and more from suppliers while slashing prices thinner and thinner. Threats of outsourcing manufacturing to China and Korea were common, and because of these tactics suppliers were going belly up day by day.

None of the major car companies are saints - all are guilty of failing to maintain an effective ecosystem. Their behaviour is as deplorable as Wal-Mart but far less infamous.

There should be a lot of other evidence of Toyota's quality falling off if that is the case. If 2005-2010 Toyotas end up rusting out faster and burning up transmissions faster then that might be the reason, from what I understand they have so far been amongst the most reliable cars ever made. There have been some suggestions that they are using lesser grade plastics and metals in some of the bodywork but I'm not sure that actual quality issues have been raised yet.

We're talking about freak accidents though. Even if these issues could be attributed to a real electronic or mechanical problem they still happen with a frequency which is probably remarkably close to the frequency of similar human errors. The successful Japanese company that has knocked off GM sure is an easy scapegoat. I wonder if there is a racial component to the complaints as well.

It's ironic, Toyota has a very long history of improving. GM is coming out of bankruptcy, as is Chrysler, according to JD Powers, Ford is the best quality American car maker and their quality is "average." I'd double down on Toyota going back to the drawing board and raising the bar even higher. If the media or congress was trying to get some American pay back they might have a window but I expect it to get substantially more difficult to compete with Toyota. Not that we should ever fear to call a corporation to task for their faults but this is one that has held overall quality in such high regard for so long and it's such a key part of their culture.

As far as I can tell there's much to be said for your thesis, except that the breakdown seems to be in design (engineering), not badly manufactured parts.

Prior to this mess I'd read that most of Toyota's major recalls were due to design defects; the cost cutting push resulted in these bad parts being put into more and more different car models resulting in bigger and bigger recalls, but the root cause was early in the process.

A little quality time with Google will find a lot of support for this, e.g. in how they drastically compressed the time to develop new models and more recently pledged to add 6? months or so to the process, although people are skeptical it actually happened.

When you burn out your engineers you're not likely be happy with the long term result.

Or, perhaps it is less that they dropped everything in their race to get ahead, and more that they lost themselves when they became so huge. Perhaps, in the lingo of hackernews, their business model is having trouble scaling past a certain point.

Japanese corporation that created devastation for the entire US auto industry

Toyota is, off the top of my head, the fourth biggest employer in the US auto industry.

A better motivation: Toyota is "a Japanese corporation that created devastation for the UAW."

Employing non-union workers doesn't count, you know.

I sympathize with the general point, but Toyota is also the fourth largest employer of unionized auto workers. They've been careful about threading the needle between competitive effectiveness and appeasing the unions to avoid getting legislated out of existence by "friends in high places". They have an advantage over the legacy auto manufacturers, though, in that they weren't here in the 70s to make the stupendously bad decisions that the unions have handcuffed the Big Three to.

(Though I guess the whole "the clever hawk hides his claws" thing is not working that well this year.)

Off the top of your head? What would it be if you looked it up?

87,700 Ford 68,500 GM 58,000 Chrysler 36,000 US employees for Toyota

If you take into account that Toyota is the largest non-domestic producer of cars in the US then it makes good sense.

What we're missing here (and in all of the Toyota articles I've seen recently) is a comparison to the number of 'sudden acceleration' incidents reported in non-Toyota vehicles. If this is simply elderly-operator error, I would expect the Lincoln Town Car to have a far worse record.

if it's operator error based, with the driver thinking they hit the brake when they really hit the gas... footwell space and pedal size and spacing- ergonomics, basically- would be very important. It's plausible Toyota's pedal layout is simply a little more vulnerable to this kind of mistake. (not a lot, cause it's still a limited occurrence, but a bit)

I doubt it, there is substantial evidence by now to rule that out, some very experienced drivers have had this happen to them.

Software glitch seems to be a good candidate.

Two anecdotal reports do not constitute 'substantial evidence.' I'm particularly skeptical about the incident last week, which could very well have been staged in the hopes of a big settlement. No one inside or outside of Toyota has been able to reproduce the alleged defect under controlled conditions, despite the great potential reward for doing so. On the other hand, incompetent, greedy, and crazy drivers are very common.

Given a simple explanation (human incompetence/greed) and a complex one (a serious mechanical flaw that cannot be reproduced and displays a bias toward the elderly), we should prefer the simpler explanation.

(Update on new questions surrounding last week's Prius incident: http://blogs.consumerreports.org/cars/2010/03/questions-rais...).

It's possible that the American 'sue happy' culture will create it's own incidents but from the amount of government involvement and the numerous recalls and 'fixes' it would seem to me that there really is some kind of issue.

What I don't get though, is that given the number of Toyotas of just about every model in service that there aren't more incidents like this. You'd say that on a given day there ought to be several malfunctions if it is a systemic error.

It would have to be a fairly rare set of conditions satisfied at the same time to bring about the bug, and I find it hard to believe that Toyota devs would not be able to come up with a bunch of scenarios after looking at their system with a magnifying glass (which I don't doubt they've been doing) that might trigger the issue until they found it.

Personally I'd have absolutely no problem in buying / driving any model Toyota, even knowing this, but I've always been wary of drive-by-wire systems and I like to figure out how to force a car to a stop.

I've owned a Honda Civic hybrid and one of the first things I did when I learned the throttle was automatic was figure out how strong the handbrake was, and what happens when you try to force the shifter in to 'N' while at speed. (be very careful not to push it one step too far :) ).

The main issue is that if the electrical system on one of these would go haywire that the torque the electric motor can put out is way stronger than what you can overcome with the brakes. The article suggests the brakes are 'electrical', that's only partially true, the brakes are 'regenerative', but there is a back-up disc system as well.

Just like any electro-mechanical industrial machine a car that has this kind of control should probably come with an 'abort' switch that shuts down the power to the engine. That in itself is also not without issues because that means your power steering goes instantly to '0' and it can be surprisingly hard to steer a car that has not been designed for manual control. On the highway that is a doable trick, at lower speeds it is more than most people (especially the ladies) can handle.

A person with 50 years of driving experience is probably not a good driver.

Did I mention 50 years ?

I was thinking of people like the woz and the guy that had his accident last week. Both of them did not struck me as either elderly or infirm.

Except that the reporting about the incidents in Toyota may worsen it (e.g. the car starts accelerating when the accelerator is hit by accident, the person remembers the news stories about Toyota accelerators, and flips out and loses all rational thought). This is partly why in the 80s the incidents were more common in Audis.

I agree. I should clarify that the data reviewed should be limited to before the story broke.

Time to get a great deal on a Toyota.

I had a sudden acceleration incident when I was maybe 12 learning to drive a 80 something Chevy 1500. I was being forced to use only one foot instead of two. When I got close to the house while parking at like 2 MPH mom yelled STOP. So of course I floored it and did a little bumper adjustment and brick relocation. I want to say this was throttle body injected, so yeah 'puter did it.

The fine article had some glaring unasked questions. The most alarming one being, if the number of immigrants is so striking, what happens when you normalize the number to take into account the high proportion of Camrys that are driven by Asian immigrants. Same question about the numbers skewing to the elderly: Very few young people drive Camrys, so why is it a surprise that people involved in Camry incidents were not young?

Age and immigrant status may still be at work in other ways. Maybe there is a defect, and older but paradoxically relatively less experienced drivers (those who came from countries with awesome public transit and very few cars) simply don't have good coping skills when an actual real defect happens. Most of us would just slip the car into neutral, but some less savvy drivers wouldn't think of it.

Alternative Hypothesis: The Toyota vehicles with this defect are the more expensive brands which typically are purchased more often by the elderly.

Younger people are driving 98 Honda Civics, etc...not 2007-2010 Camrys, so they would be expected to make a smaller part of the population.

With that said, my gut does tend to find the age-pattern of people experiencing unintended acceleration to be worth following up...

I second your hypothesis. The data definitely needs to be normalized by the population distribution of Toyota cars under question. First, I wouldn't call 55 year-olds as "old people" who are so senile as to mistake pedals. Second, assuming her data is accurate (a risky assumption judging from the informal tone of the post and total lack of rigor), what if the age-unknown group is included with, say, the 30 year-old group (could be, since the ages are unknown), the conclusion then seems so much weaker.

I have noticed that many bloggers and journalists have come to Toyota's aid recently. As another conspiracy theory, could this be somewhat fueled by Toyota's PR?

When I was in college, I once had the accelerator stick on my 1979 Toyota Celica GT. I punched it in order to merge onto a 4 lane highway, and it stuck down. I braked a bit which was not very useful, and ended up putting it into neutral and then killing the engine. Scared the crap outta me. To this day I'm not sure why it stuck, I thought it could have been the floor mats at the time.

This happens on my Corolla, which is quite old now. If I floor the gas on the highway, it continues to accelerate for a while after letting go the gas. It freaked me out the first time. The folks in the shop told me that I have a build-up of carbon on the throttle body, which causes the throttle to be sticky. They offered to clean it off, but I couldn't be bothered to pay for it. There's definitely nothing wrong with the pedal or any electronic control systems, it's just a car that needs tuning up.

People should really focus their energy into demanding better safety features on all cars instead of getting caught up on one defect. We should also be focusing on getting bad drivers off the road and requiring on-going driver education/testing at least past a certain age. In all this controversy with Toyota I haven't seen much media discussion over why "cheap cars" lack such basic safety features of higher end models including some of these throttle fail-safe systems that would have nullified the Toyota problem.

Um, isn't it the case that all this suggests is that some of the incidents were operator error? And didn't we assume that all along? It clearly isn't happening to most drivers. Or even many. Or even a remotely significant sampling of drivers. That's not the point.

No, unless you're assuming that only old people are capable of operator error.

This suggests that 'sudden acceleration' is biased towards old people, and we know that operator error of the wrong-pedal type is as well. It doesn't suggest that only cases involving old people could be operator error.

The story on NPR where the highway patrol officer is doing 90MPH for several minutes next to the guy who's trying to pry up the gas pedal with one hand while controlling the car with the other doesn't sound too much like someone getting the wrong pedal.

Maybe a bunch of these cases are just the ambient stupidity that we've always had. That doesn't mean there's nothing to the story.

That story was complete and total horseshit.

I've listened to the full 911 tape recording, and none of it adds up... he doesn't sound scared, he doesn't try to put it into neutral, he doesn't try to turn it off (he claims he was afraid the car might flip), but he does claim he tried to pry up the gas pedal (which is an essentially impossible physical move, to do with your hand while driving).

Not to mention that he has a ridiculously shady past (bankruptcy, $700k of debt, runs an adult website, entire kitchen of his house was stolen during foreclosure, former business partner accuses him of theft)

Honestly... if you're going to cite him as an example of anything, he seems like proof that a lot of these incidents are pretty obviously frauds.

I'll concede that my brain went "NPR, corroborated by highway patrol", and got on with my life. If I didn't prefer German cars, I'd buy a Toyota.

My first car was American, the second Japanese, now I have a German car. Is Italian next? ;)

Young drivers are expected to make mistakes, older drivers aren't expected to make mistakes. This unfairly biases error towards manufacturer.

I frequently seeing older drivers failing to signal and many other basic errors expected from an inexperienced driver, so why wouldn't the odd driver catch the gas instead of the break, maybe cause their seat got rearranged or whatever.

A young driver having this problem will be suspected of operator error, the first assumption for an older driver should be operator error. A dual-standard creates errors.

Regardless of the details of the actual defect, I think this whole Toyota fiasco highlights a problem in training. The sad reality is that the vast majority of the fatalities could have been prevented if the driver had simply shifted into neutral.

It's important to understand our machines instead of depending on them.

I would tend to agree ... but what if all the relevant controls are "fly by wire" and there's a problem there?

Based on something I just read I'd guess the transmission lever for the Prius is one of those (it was described as being on the dash, quite close to the steering wheel and as very simple: F, R, N and a B to save your mechanical brakes on a downgrade (regenerative braking, no doubt)); I really hope the brake and emergency brake controls aren't (yet or ever).

One way to understand cars better is to learn how to drive a manual transmission. You'll become more attuned to engine speed, which gear you're in, the responsiveness of your gas pedal, etc.

That and even if my drive by wire throttle sticks open and the clutch cable breaks(or lose fluid if it's a hydraulic system.) I can still force the car into neutral and stop quickly with the brakes, then shut the engine off to avoid over revving it.

Have there been many cases outside the US? This whole thing seems very US-centric, considering these cars are sold all over the world.

It would be interesting to find out the computer literacy of those people involved. For a non computer literate person, having a computer take over for even a second I would think would scare them in doing all sorts of things.

It's very irrational as when they fly on an airplane it is the computer that flies the plane most of the way. (Perhaps I naively think that even a computer illiterate person knows about the use of autopilots).

On the other hand, their other experience with "computers" has been seeing blue screens of death and having to reboot to "fix it".

But perhaps because of this, Toyota has to engage heavily in perception management. Even if they identify a software problem, they would love to blame it one a 'floor mat' as that makes it clear and predictable in people's minds ("oh it's just a floor mat, I understand that") as opposed to saying it is some electronic brain that is damaged that decides randomly to take over and kill drivers.

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