Toyota Reaches $1.2B Settlement in Criminal Inquiry
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Do we say "nobody use your toaster until the firmware is updated" or do we do the traditional recall thing and offer an exchange to those who registered their product, or do we go full in and use the internet to say, "your toaster will not work until it is updated".
We see some of this in Windows 8. It routinely says you need to install the update in the next hour, your PC is going to reboot, do so now or later. This is an attempt to keep your computer safe even if it creates a bad user experience.
Should cars do the same thing? Should Toasters? How unsafe does it need to be to warrant preventing use?
Put yours on, put it in drive, and you'll find that applying throttle will likely easily override the emergency brake. It's there to stop the car from rolling down a hill, not to fight the engine.
Hell, I once drove my parents' car about a mile without realizing it had the brake on.
That should certainly have enough force to hold a car stopped or at least stop a pair of wheels from spinning.
If I didn't notice much difference at zero MPH, it's unlikely to make any sort of difference at highway speeds.
Humans react very irrationally even with training. It's easy to sit in your chair and say someone did the wrong thing.
They stepped on the wrong pedal, it's that simple. Oh, and they weren't an American car company.
Did you read the article?
> Prosecutors said that Toyota concealed problems related to floor mats and sticky accelerator pedals... Investigators discovered internal Toyota documents that acknowledged serious problems with its vehicles.
American companies took to using recalls as "preventive" measures decades ago. They learned to have a lot of them without the government forcing them so that the really nasty ones get buried in the shuffle and the mechanic just replaces the parts he's told...
Toyota fought the government hard every step of the way, even in making the design materials and manufacturing information hauled off to Japan... mostly because the pedal issue already had large lawsuits before Toyota even acknowledged looking at the problem. If they issued a recall, all that was going to hit the lawsuit train.... Not to mention in Japan companies just don't get hauled over the coals like this... They thought they'd fight it.
On my Passat, conflicting inputs (ie, pushing both brake and throttle) would result in the throttle being cut. I seem to remember Toyota implementing a similar system after this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parking_brake
"Although sometimes known as an emergency brake, using it in any emergency where the footbrake is still operational is likely to badly upset the brake balance of the car and vastly increase the likelihood of loss of control of the vehicle, for example by initiating a rear-wheel skid. Additionally, the stopping force provided by using the handbrake is small and would not significantly aid in stopping the vehicle."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6636811
Edit: and the title got edited to be the NYT title, which obscures the relevance to Hacker News. Ah well. This settlement is directly related to the court case Toyota recently lost, with expert testimony about the poor quality of Toyota's embedded safety-critical firmware...
Do you even want/need power steering assist in a runaway situation?
mzr's comment above gives good advice: don't turn off or remove the key in a moving vehicle. Shift to neutral if the gas pedal is stuck.
Which begs the question: why isn't the electric-assist motor designed to freewheel when power is lost? Losing steering assist at speed would be a more manageable situation.
In my sole unintended acceleration incident (floormat) I was beginning (but committed to) a turn. I put the car into neutral and came out of it okay. (people forget that any modern engine has a rev limiter so neutral is really pretty safe)
It would have made a bad situation worse for me if I had lost my steering. I've lost steering on that car (lost the generator for a few seconds in the wet on two separate occasions) and I can confirm what someone else said about the steering getting quite heavy.
If the key is in the ON, or ACC position the steering lock will not engage[0]. I do agree that killing the engine should not be the first thing to do. It should introduce a fuel or ignition cut to lower RPM (like some cars do in neutral to avoid users from doing neutral to drive WOT drops).
[0] I used to work on cars for a living.
So at worst the steering would be locked for only a second.
No "lets wait for the facts" but outright derision about stupid drivers hitting the Accelerator and then blaming the car. The fact that there were many reports and many consumers affected did not seem to matter.
Well $1.2 Billion proves that not everyone was mistaken which "pedal" they hit. When will people start going to jail over this?
The problem comes because when your car starts doing something completely unexpected and terrifying, most people panic, so if your gas pedal gets caught on the floormat, you won't have the presence of mind to go through a mental checklist of things you can do to stop the car. My guess is that to the extent that floormat problems caused gas pedals to stick, for 99% of the drivers, they hit the brake and kicked the gas pedal free and they were fine. But 1% of the people, in their panic, hit the gas by accident or just freaked out and froze, and crashed their cars.
Now, since it appears that Toyota tried to cover up the fact that there was a legitimate engineering or design problem at play, then they probably deserve the fine. Even if panic and driver error contributed to each and every incident, it doesn't mean that Toyota wasn't responsible for creating a situation wherein a driver had to cope with a terrifying, unexpected car malfunction.
What this whole incident proves to me is that we're very cavalier about the dangers of having millions of poorly-trained, distracted operators of powerful machines zipping all over the streets of our planet. Self-driving cars can't come soon enough.
Why do people have to go to jail? One of the fortés of our economic system is its tolerance for failure. Stupidity, while a liability in civil court, is not criminally prosecuted.
Fraud, gross negligence, etc. are. The bar for proving guilt of those offences is high. I do not believe that high standard has been met, at least not yet. The situation deserves criminal investigation, perhaps. But jumping to the conclusion of jailing those involved is rash.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...