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Software Glitches Stall Toyota Prius
t35t0r writes "CNN/Money/Tech reports that 2004 and early 2005 Toyota Prius models have software bugs that cause them to stall while traveling at highway speeds. While no accidents were reported to have been caused by the software glitch, could we be heading into an era where our automobiles will require software updates and fixes to keep them from literally 'crashing'?"
...from Ford.
Like planes, and other vehicles, any software problem should failover to a tested, less automated system. If my car stalls on the highway and I lose power steering and/or brakes, there's a big problem. Instead of stalling the engine, it should just shut down and let the engine take over, maybe flashing some warning lights.
I was only trying to install the latest windshield wiper drivers....
My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch.
for my flying car. There will be a plumet, followed by a very sudden stop at the end.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
...then... uh... i guess things would be just like they are now
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I guess blue is going to be the dreadest color for a production line....
Sounds very Familiar
More to the point. How does everyone feel giving up full control of thier car? What about the Mercedes digital brakes? There is no physical link between the pedal and the wheels.
We were promised self driving cars, and we're on the way to it.
--sig fault--
"You have shifted gears. You must restart your car for these changes to take effect."
The 2001/2002 Ford Escapes have to have the EEPROM flashed as part of a transmission recall. The days of software fixes for cars have been with us for a while.
Oh. At red lights. Not at highway speeds. Never mind.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Toyota's new slogan: "Where to you wa..."
video of the car-to-car worm via bluetooth/ wifi that stalls cars
you would watch it move like a wave through traffic: on one end, normal moving traffic, on the other, fender benders and honking horns and frozen cars
it would move under overpasses and propagate upward and spread in either direction, like dominoes
awesome and frightening and completely plausible in the next 10-20 years
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
They meant:
It's a five minute software upgrade, but if we told you that, you'd be upset when the service dept made you wait for an hour.
is still the world most reliable car
it has nothing to do with electronics
Back in the 80s, I had an old beater 1971 Chevy Van with the usual Weird Chevy Electrical Problems. Every once in a while the engine would stop running while I was driving down the road (which is a problem for power steering...), so I'd put it in neutral and reboot, which would usually work. My current van is a 1987 Chevy, with a new engine installed about 5 years ago. The engine's not quite identical to the original, and every once in a while the monitoring system decides something's wrong and turns on the "Service Engine Soon" light, typically when I accelerate to pass somebody while going uphill on a freeway. There's no harm done, as long as that's the cause (as opposed to something actually being wrong with it), but to turn the light off you also have to reboot the car.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
could we be heading into an era where our automobiles will require software updates and fixes to keep them from literally 'crashing'?"
Without putting too fine a point on it, yes! But there is no reason to go all chicken little. Standards of reliability for automotive software are generally much higher than for desktop PC software. No EULAs and auto manufacturers generally can not disclaim warranties. If a car breaks down due to crappy software, Consumer Reports will put out a report and people won't buy it. Additionally there are Lemon Laws and lots of eager lawyers to protect consumers. Unlike PCs where we have been trained to expect crashing software, people don't put up with that in cars, especially since there is the potential for physical harm when hurtling down the road at 80mph.
Minardi had a software glitch take out both their F1 cars at last weekend's grand prix, are they the next Microsoft?
Well no, Minardi cars can start without an activation key.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
From the actual article: The report said no injuries or fatalities have been linked to the problem, but it did not say whether there had been accidents due to the problem.
Close enough for government work, eh?
If OS's Were Cars If operating systems ran your car, and you needed to go to the shops... MS-DOS: You get in the car and try to remember where you put the keys. Windows: You get in the car and drive to the shops very slowly, because attached to the back of the car is a freight train. Macintosh System 7: You get in the car to drive to the shops and the car drives you to church. Unix: You get in the car and type 'grep store'. After reaching speeds of 200 mph en route, you arrive at the barbershop. Windows NT: You get in the car and write a letter that says "go to the shops". Then you get out of the car and nail the letter to the dashboard. Taligent/Pink: You walk to the store with Ricardo Montalban who tells you how wonderful it will be when he can fly you to the store in his LearJet. OS/2: After fuelling up with 6000 gallons of fuel, you get in the car and drive to the shops with a motorcycle escort and a marching band in procession. Halfway there, the car blows up, killing everyone. S/36 SSP: You get in the car and drive to the shops. Halfway there you run out of fuel. While walking the rest of the way, you are run over by kids with mopeds. AS/400: An attendant kicks you into the car and then drives you to the shops where you get to watch everyone else buying filets mignon.
1.2 million people a year die on the world's roads. Yet whenever a one-off incident (even a non-fatal / non injury one) grabs the headlines because there was something unusual about it, people start to panic.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I guess not everyone has seen this. I thought it was kinda funny.
(From Here
At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five dollar cars that got 1000 miles to the gallon.
In response to Mr. Gates' comments, General Motors issued the following press release (by Mr. Welch himself, the GM CEO).
If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
1. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you'd have to buy a new car.
2. Occasionally your car would just die on the motorway for no reason, and you'd have to restart it. For some strange reason, you'd just accept this, restart and drive on.
3. Occasionally, executing a manoeuvre would cause your car to stop and fail to restart and you'd have to re-install the engine. For some strange reason, you'd just accept this too.
4. You could only have one person in the car at a time, unless you bought a "Car 95" or a "Car NT". But then you'd have to buy more seats.
5. Amiga would make a car that was powered by the sun, was twice as reliable, five times as fast, twice as easy to drive - but it would only run on five percent of the roads.
6. Macintosh car owners would get expensive Microsoft upgrades to their cars which would make their cars go much slower.
7. The oil, engine, gas and alternator warning lights would be replaced with a single "General Car Fault" warning light.
8. People would get excited about the "new" features in Microsoft cars, forgetting completely that they had been available in other cars for many years.
9. We'd all have to switch to Microsoft gas and all auto fluids but the packaging would be superb.
10. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.
11. The airbag system would say "Are you sure?" before going off.
12. If you were involved in a crash, you would have no idea what happened.
13. They wouldn't build their own engines, but form a cartel with their engine suppliers. The latest engine would have 16 cylinders, multi-point fuel injection and 4 turbos, but it would be a side-valve design so you could use Model-T Ford parts on it.
14. There would be an "Engium Pro" with bigger turbos, but it would be slower on most existing roads.
15. Microsoft cars would have a special radio/cassette player which would only be able to listen to Microsoft FM, and play Microsoft Cassettes. Unless of course, you buy the upgrade to use existing stuff.
16. Microsoft would do so well, because even though they don't own any roads, all of the road manufacturers would give away Microsoft cars free, including IBM!
17. If you still ran old versions of car (ie. CarDOS 6.22/CarWIN 3.11), then you would be called old fashioned, but you would be able to drive much faster, and on more roads!
18. If you couldn't afford to buy a new car, then you could just borrow your friends, and then copy it.
19. Whenever you bought a car, you would have to reorganise the ignition for a few days before it worked.
20. You would need to buy an upgrade to run cars on a motorway next to each other.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
Regular devourers of world news will recall that a few years ago, Bridgestone/Firestone got sued for producing tires with a propensity for exploding. A few years before then, there were horror stories of malfunctioning cruise control that would activate itself due to a short-circuit, with no way to switch it off.
Actually, a similar fault to that last one even appeared on the Space Shuttle - the last launch window was scrubbed when it was realized that the attitude rockets could fire themselves, even when the power was switched off.
Engineering to build fault-tolerent systems (ie: systems that will still behave sensibly, even when something goes wrong) is expensive, difficult, time-consuming and requires enormous resources to cover every possible aspect.
Even when faced with the prospect of multi-million dollar lawsuits for death/injury, it is often cheaper to simply let people die a torturous, firey death in agony than to prevent such incidents from arising. Because we live in a competitive world, where success is measured in dollars, there is simply no incentive to get things right. Getting things affordably wrong is a far more profitable approach.
It would be possible to build a car that can do 100 miles to the gallon, be able to keep the occupants intact after a 150 mph head-on collision (F1 monocoques can handles 240 mph collisions) and have software driving every aspect of the system that is not only 100% free of bugs but is able to adapt to handle the natural degredation of the hardware. Such a car would cost about as much as a NASA Space Shuttle and don't expect the insurance to be any less, simply because of the theft value.
A company producing such a car might sell as many as one. The McLaren F1 road car would be much more affordable but is wtill somewhere in the low double-digit sales, and was reportedly still in single-figure sales at the end of the first year.
Having said that, I think that it should be mandatory that car companies produce the very best they can. Failure is not only an option, it's often so cheap that it's the best option. That should not be the case, ever. Bugs in software and failures of hardware are going to happen in the Real World, but they should not be encouraged. Good practices, good designs and thorough design reviews should be the norm.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"The steering is even drive by wire."
I call BS on this one.
Any other cobra owners remember the 2003 stall issue? That one caused several accidents and took a long time for Ford to release a fix for the problem, I personally only had it happen once and that was in a long sweeping turn at about 70mph, I was about to get on the brakes because of slower traffic ahead of me and it stalled out leaving me with no ps or vac assisted brakes in a turn moving faster than I should have been. Lucky for me I recovered with no problem, but it could have been bad.
Dude, lighten up - if you RTFA Toyota already admitted there was a problem and has a fix. Geesh. I've heard of brand loyalty, but that was just rediculous. ~Everything~ breaks - it's life, get over it.
Growing up we did most of our own car repairs, changed the oil, etc. But with our newer car we cannot do a lot if something goes wrong, especially with electronics which is what fails 90% of the time.
The day my push mower won't start because of a faulty sensor is probably the day I really get mad. Why? Because with all this technology, I think many, especially engineers, might have forgotten that true genisus is making something complex simple. Too often I think we are making simple things way too complex.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
>> I have a 1999 Volvo S80 [...]
>> The steering is even drive by wire.
I think this is only partially correct. That car, like all other cars to date, has a direct mechanical connection between the steering wheel and the angle of the front wheels. That connection is the primary means of changing the car's direction. You should be able to observe this by turning the ignition to the unlocked (but off) position and observing that the front wheels still budge when you turn the wheel.
Volvo does have drive by wire for their outboard motors and for their line of forklifts, but the technology is not in cars yet; probably for legal reasons it has to be 100% reliable before they'll risk it.
There is one other sense in which you are correct: when the stability management thing intervenes, it is capable of steering the car to some degree, however it does so by activating the brakes individually or changing the throttle position not by turning the wheel. It's also possible that the power steering unit has electronically controlled boost under control of the stability management thing and tones down the boost when you're already oversteering. But these systems (braking and boost reduction) would not come into play in normal driving.
but that's because they run out of gas between refuelling stops every few miles ...
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
or just imagine the Blue Screams of Death ... or Red Screams one supposes ... when that happens.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Except there are confirmed reports...and Toyota admits they have a software bug. Obviously you love your car to the point you are irrational about it. My friend owns a Prius and he was happy to know there was a problem so he will be that much more careful when he drives up to Santa Fe on the freeway this weekend. Obviously there is some corner case that causes the software to do this or it would happen a lot more often...it isn't surprsing you haven't experienced it. But you do understand that even though you haven't experienced anything yet, something wrong could be just around the corner. And just becasue you haven't experienced any significant problems, doesn't mean that others are making problems up when things go wrong with theirs.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Bullshit. You don't know what the hell you're talking about.
No car in production today has drive by wire steering. Mercedes has drive by wire brakes, but even those have a mechanical backup in case something goes wrong.
And no auto manufacturer in their right mind would design a car to operate using a client/server architecture. What would be the point? You could sit in your car and control a Volvo on the other side of the parking lot?
I think you're just throwing out buzzwords and hoping for a mod up.
This space intentionally left blank.
According to the organizations (JD Power, Consumer reports) who do objective studies of such things, the Prius has been more reliable, with higher owner satisfaction, that almost any other model.
Electronic systems are, in general, more reliable, with lower failure rates, than the mechanical systems they replace. They are also easier to service. (Though the repair bill may very well be higher, and specialized equipment may be necessary.)
This "software", as others have said, are not the same as the software we run on our PCs. The software quality standards are higher, and the testing is far more intense.
People lament the loss of simpler mechanical systems that can be fixed with know-how and a socket set. We publicize every example of a system failure we hear of. But the numbers don't lie: a 2005 model with a half-dozen embedded computers has a far lower incidence of problems than a corresponding 1970 model when it was new. You are far less likely to ever have to call a tow truck in your lifetime than your father/grandfather was.
Sensationalism is so much more fun than fact, though.
After pulling into a Denny's parking lot, I hit the power button to "reboot" the car... fortunately, most of the lights disappeared, and the gas engine kicked in, but there was still a few alert and check-engine lights on. I was able to drive the car another 15 or so miles at full highway speeds to the dealership, who were able to pull the problem codes (P3191 P0A0F) and reprogrammed my computer... and all is great again!
While I agree that the problem is alarming, it wasn't as bad as the article claims... the electric engine still gave me all the power I need to pull over safely. And this was the only problem I've ever encountered with the Prius, after 13 months and 18000 miles!
no no no no no
do not turn off the ignition until the car is stopped if you do that you loose your power steering and brakes, the engine will bounce of the rev limiter for a minute but shit happens.
1. shift to neutral
2. stop car
3. turn off ignition
4 . profit (sue ford)
... because perhaps by then all the people repeating the tired jokes about "if microsoft made cars" will have given up.
Oh wait, this is slashdot, even the dupe is going to have tired jokes.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
Isn't that what recalls and engine checks have been doing all along, except for physical parts?
Before you walk a mile in someone's shoes, you should insult them so you know how they are and what they're doing.
Power brakes are designed to stop the car from its top speed with the engine off. Enough vacuum is left to perform that maneuver just fine. If, by chance, you do lose brakes, you can still stop it without power assist, and you also have the handbrake to think about. And if you lose power steering...big whoop, so you have to turn the wheel a bit harder.
Shifting into neutral does start slowing the car down. Problem is, some newer electronic automatic transmissions won't accept your shift into neutral at that high of a tach. This is especially true of those automatic manual thingies where you can shift up or down without a clutch and whatnot.
But you really need to learn more about your car if you're going to drive one. It's kind of scary to know that there are people out there who think that if you turn off the engine, suddenly you won't be able to brake or steer. That's just not true. In fact, I suggest trying it in an abandoned parking lot sometime. Get moving a bit, then cut your power (NOT all the way to Lock, then your steering wheel does lock). Then try to steer, brake, etc. It'll all still work.
"Excuse me, did you say 'Trekker'? The word is 'Trekkie.' I should know; I created them." -- Gene Roddenberry
Whenever I get a 'new' car, I run down to the nearby college at night and find an empty lot and slide around a bit, and see what happens when I turn the engine off and if I can turn the key back and have it start magically, aka, a push start, which is incredibly useful if your car stalls while you're driving down the highway. (The other option being a normal start in neutral, but that takes much longer. And wouldn't work if your battery was dead, but that's a rather worse-case scenerio.)
Then I come back and do it again when it's raining, solely for seeing how it skids.
And if I have a car I've never tried it on, and I'm on a completely empty and straight stretch of highway, I kill the engine there, too, to see if it does something different at high speeds. (That's probably a traffic violation, but if a cop appeared out of the blue, I'd just say I stalled for some reason.)
I will admit I've never tried to solve a hypothetical 'stuck pedal', but, OTOH, the parking lots aren't really big enough for that. It's a good idea, though. I know I can shift into neutral at any speed, but I agree that cutting the engine is better...for one thing, it should let the engine slow down the car. I'll have to figure out some way to test that.
Do people really drive around in a ton of metal and not know in advance how it operates when bad things happen to it? When, exactly, are they planning on learning? The time to learn what happens when you slam on the brakes on a puddle of water is not in the middle of traffic. I once had an early antilock system that pulsed the brakes really oddly...there was a lag between losing traction and the unlocking of the brake, or something, I never really figured it out.
I mean, there are somethings you can't learn until they happen, for example, if you really need to stop the car, you can switch into park when you're going 20 mph, but you'd obviously never want to do that unless you had to. But what happens when your engine cuts off, or if you hit a patch of water while turning? Everyone should test that.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Microsoft Windows for Automobiles - "Where do you want to stall, today?"
Power for PS(Power Steering) is provited by the rotation of the engine components. The power is moved to the PS pump via a belt (usualy, some are electric these days.) When you kill the ignition but the car is still in gear, the engine will still be rotating, as it wull still be conected to the drive train. Thus, PS will not fail until the speed of engine rotation is greatly diminished.
Power for PB(Power Brakes)is USUALY provited by vacum assist. This is created by the "sucking" power of an engine as it pulls air in the intake and pushes it out the exhaust. The engine is an air pump. As long as the engine turns you will get some vac. The effectiveness of PB will dimish at a migh faster rate than PB. BUT, there will be more than enough power in the PB system even after the engine stops rotating to fully depress the brakes to the floor. Basicly, as long as you don't need to come to a full and complete stop more than once after you shut off the engine the PB system will work just fien for you after the ignition switch is set to the OFF position.
Therefore, the best way to stop a vehicle with a run-away throttle is to 1) Kill the throttle, 2) Apply brakes 3) Shift transmission into lowest available gear(to use the fiction of the internal engine components to maximum effect in the effort to bring your vehicle to a stop.) 4) find something to "rub" your car against to use in an effort to bleed off knetic energy (your fenders are now your brake pads.)
Under most circumstances you will never need to use more than steps 1 and 2. In a downhill situation where gravity is adding knetic energy to your vehicle and simply stoping your car RIGHT NOW won't do (fast lane of a multi-lane highway) then you can use step 3 to conserve power in your PB system for when you are going to bring the vehicle to a complete stop. Step 4 is for when your brakes fail (and this get interesting*)
*interesting is defined by having thoughts along the lines of "Oh my God, we're all gonna die!"
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
If you drive like me then 90 MPH is highway speed.
and my wife's, twice. She has had hers in for the "recalibration of the computer." We'll see if hers acts any differently now than it did before.
It seems to me that the problem occurs when the computer tries to restart the engine, and it doesn't catch immediately. It does seem that the car will continue to run as an electric car, and it does seem to come its senses within a few seconds.
My blindingly white Prius is nicknamed "Snowcrash" for exactly this reason -- if the computer goes down, it's just a car shaped hunk of metal.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Yow. I saw a Prius on the side of the highway this morning - I was wondering what could have gone wrong with it, since it looked brand new.
:)
The driver was wandering around the hood looking like he wanted to open it, but had no idea what to do when he did
Sorry for NOT using the preview button to catch my typos.
Also Item 1 in my car-stoping system should be KILL THE IGNITION not KILL THE THROTTLE.
Sorry for any confusion that this may have caused.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
by optimization of air/fuel mixture the computer saves the fuel, allows to start the in a one or two seconds even in very cold weather, motor power is increased , catalyc converter can be used effectivly etc.
Well, even entire power plants, chemical plants, oil refineries, dams and almost entire industry is controlled by computer and works fine (mostly).
Living with computers is sometimes hard, but it would be quite harder without them!
---
Computers are just another machines that is hard to master
I'm not insane. My mother had me tested.
Do people really drive around in a ton of metal and not know in advance how it operates when bad things happen to it?
.
you must either be living outside the USA, or are very young and has very little experience with your fellow driver on the roads
Yes, 99.997% of all drivers do not know ANYTHING about their car. Hell a large subset of that group can barely drive.
Examples? Ok. offramp, semi and a line of cars taking it. Semi merges onto highway as does 40% of the cars, the other 60% try to speed past the semi on the shoulder/ last 300 feet of on-ramp then get pissy when the SEMI does not jam on the brakes and kill everyone behind them just to let the idiots in front of them.
This happens on a regular basis, People that drive happily at the speed limit continue that highway speed through construction zones (did they miss all the orange barrels?) and get pissy about the people that dared to slow down in the construction zone and not drive 70mph 3 feet from the construction workers.
Most people on the road barely can drive their car safely, let alone an advanced topic like knowing how the car they own reacts in different situations.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yes they do, and some of them think people like us are nuts.
Like you, I have spent some time experimenting with the limits of my cars. I've always done my experiments when theres no other traffic around, and yes I've checked the max speed of my cars in these conditions too. On a few occasions this has come up in conversation and some people have berated me for risking my life. I've tried explaining to these sheepheads the value of the knowledge I've collected, but they're response is usually along the lines of "if you drive according to the regulations nothing will every go wrong". Bullshit!
I've had one highspeed crash (60kph) when my car aquaplaned on a slight bend. Thanks to the fact that I had done some experimental driving, I didn't panic, got the car back under some kind of control and didn't cross into the other lane of oncoming traffic. Sure I hit a signpost and damaged the front of my car, but I drove away afterwards and nobody got hurt.
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